On January 18 2012, Wikipedia went black to draw attention to SOPA [0], a bill they described as one that "could fatally damage the free and open Internet".
Since then, we've seen a slow and steady march in the direction we all dreaded. Country after country has decided that they have the right to block content on the "free and open Internet", and business after business (even those who joined the SOPA protests) has complied. Someone looking ahead from 2012 would barely recognize the internet today as being the same thing, the way we just roll over to the threats that used to cause global outrage and defiance.
Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
It's not just the newer generations. I have multiple friends who are literally afraid of using ad blockers and sideloading apps on their Macs in fear of some imaginary boogeyman out to get them. And VPNs are exclusively the domain of criminals, apparently. There are a dominating amount of people who have turned into the caricature of the perfect CONSUMER. It is so frustrating.
It can go the other way, too. I’m a computer programmer and I don’t use an ad-blocker, one of the reasons being that the presence of add is a very good indicator of websites that I should avoid. That strategy makes me actuality consume less content on the web, which I find as a big plus, and that’s because the great majority of today’s websites are filled with ads.
Related, the same goes for TV, where I don’t try to avoid them by purchasing an even more exclusive access to TV content (such as streaming), I just choose not to watch it because mainstream TV has become infested by ads. So the idea is not to play the game, just to ignore it.
While I understand the motivation, decent ad blockers such as uBlock Origin do a lot more than just block visible conventional advertisements. So by not running an ad block, unfortunately there might be a great deal of private data about your browser habits that are being exfiltrated without your knowledge.
That's not a very useful approach unless you go full Ted Kaczynski and disconnect entirely. For those of us living in a society, not seing ads when vising websites you effectively have to visit to do that is the preferable option.
Nothing about an ad blocker stops you from limiting your exposure to ad-supported media but it makes it more bearable in the cases where avoiding it would be even worse.
To be fair, adblockers have an inordinate amount of access. We all trust uBlock’s creator but I’ve never met him. So it’s a realistic risk but we (hope) not a threat
>To be fair, chromium has an inordinate amount of access. We all trust chromium’s developers but I’ve never met them. So it’s a realistic risk but we (hope) not a threat.
>To be fair, Windows has an inordinate amount of access. We all trust Microsoft developers but I’ve never met them. So it’s a realistic risk but we (hope) not a threat.
I can keep going to point out how flawed this line of reasoning is, especially the second one with forced push for Recall.
It’s weakly worse to trust your OS + Browser + third party, than just OS + Browser.
Moreover, small projects can be purchased more easily. See PIA. Users need to stay updated about ownership changes. It might be viable for us, but not for everyone.
The ones using declarative blocking (like everything compatible with Safari or newer Manifest V3 web extensions for Chrome and Firefox) don't need access to your browsing context.
They're not as powerful as the ones that are able to inject content into visited pages or programmatically inspect and block/alter HTTP requests, but personally I think it's a reasonable tradeoff for the reasons you mentioned.
Chrome/Google got a very bad rep for pushing this change, and I don't want to speculate about their actual motivations, but the security aspect of it seems sound to me.
With uBlock Lite (which uses MV3), it's also possible to additionally grant "full site access" on a site by site base in case the rules-based blocking alone isn't enough; that seems ideal to me.
It really is not a reasonable tradeoff because it effectively freezes the tools the blockers have in the ongoing arms race while the advertisers are able to adopt new tricks. Which is also why advertising companies (which includes all major browser makers) would like to pass it off a reasonable tradeoff.
That would be the express road to long-term unpatched vulnerabilities.
There's basically two ways to have safe web extensions: Carefully control their entire supply chain (which could easily cause big antitrust problems for Google as the vendor of the most popular browser), or minimize the things they have access to.
It is the better road, and the road chosen by most other things that aren't SaaS, including Google's other most popular thing, Android. Keep the default to auto-update, fine, but let me disable that, as the Android app store does. Attacks from previously trusted extensions (and apps) being updated and then doing malicious things (requesting new permissions to do them is not significant friction) are worse and more frequent than old unpatched extensions being vulnerable to something. (That "something" likely being in the realm of XSS or click-jacking from a malicious page, much harder to widely exploit.)
I'm sure it's happened, but I haven't heard of an extension suffering from a significant "unpatched vulnerability" and being exploited in the wild -- I have heard of things like this click-jacking issue in Privacy Badger: https://blog.lizzie.io/clickjacking-privacy-badger.html No wild exploits afaik, just the PoC, and the ultimate worst-case impact was just (reversibly) disabling the extension for the page or a site, which isn't very severe. Perhaps a more advanced extension like Ruffle that uses Rust and WASM has a more severe attack surface than the majority of extensions written in JavaScript, but even if it does, it must be exploited by a malicious page targeting it, vs. the alternative of auto-updating to a malicious version and doing whatever it can get away with immediately.
Extensions getting taken over or just transferred to new owners and updating to do something new and malicious is quite routine and multiple examples come readily to my mind. The first to come to mind is Stylish, several years ago: https://robertheaton.com/2018/07/02/stylish-browser-extensio... (I was not impacted because I didn't update the extension during its vulnerable window, which was months, and apparently over a year for Chrome.)
The safe way to handle these issues is to let users turn off auto-updating, and to have actual policies to mitigate the damages from malicious extensions. Firefox itself will disable extensions that become known to be defective in someway, this can be independent of whether the issue is an unpatched vulnerability, whether there's a patch/update to address it, whether the extension isn't just bugged but doing something malicious, whether it always was malicious from first install or just suddenly became malicious... See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-cause-issues-ar...
You're taking about access you're afraid an extension might be exploited to expose versus ad networks and social media plugins that are known to expose.
I'll take the potential bogeyman over the real one, thanks.
I am pretty sure most extensions (or at least ublock) can be set to stay off on specific websites? The extension can have an extra list of known safe sites that don't have ads where the extension stays off by default (should still be turn on-able because the list might be outdated).
In uBlock's case, when you first install it on Firefox you are peomoted to give it permission to "Access data for all websites that you visit". Even if you disable adblocking on a specific website Unlock still has access to it and can see it.
If you go to your government’s office and they give you a list of names of known advertisers, then walk along your merry way and use the list to not engage those advertisers, the only trust you need is the source of the information on that list, not the list or your observance to it.
Your observance of it is open source in the case of ublock. The list should still be scrutinized, it’s a local system with an unverified source. That’s all.
"With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users."
- Richard M. Stallman, 2011, writing in Der Spiegel
He was right. He was always right. About all of it. People didn't listen, or perhaps were never introduced to his ideas. Software grew faster than the idea of free software (on some level this was inevitable, since the latter is by definition a subset of the former).
And so, the noose tightened a little more every year.
The remedy has never changed: you must explain to people why freedom is important, and what the terrible consequences are of non-freedom. Refer them to the free software ecosystem, Linux and the FSF. Many will not listen. But whether they listen is to some extent irrelevant. Life is more fulfilling when it is lived ethically. By doing your part to advocate for freedom and against its enemies, you are at least making your own welfare better, and hopefully someone else's too.
Lots of comments here remind me of another rms quote: "They seem to have learned the habit of cowering before authority even when
not actually threatened. How very nice for authority. I decided not to
learn this particular lesson."
You must have missed the other news this week. Linux has joined the dark side too. Banning people based on nationality is certainly against freedom and any kind of ethics worthy of being called that.
> Linux has joined the dark side too. Banning people based on nationality
"Linux" is not banning anybody. They must comply with the sanctions against Putin regime that many governments in the world raised, in response to insane Putin's behavior.
Linux is not banning people based on nationality, is banning people based on their employers that is a different question. Linux has every right to ban somebody that would be working for a cartel, for example. This is a win-win for the people banned also, because protects them to be targeted and forced by the Russian regime to participate on war crimes.
Calling about "mafreedom!" and "your lack of ethics" just looks deranged and out of the reality. "mafreedom to kill you (and you must help me to build the bombs or are a very bad guy)" is preschool level material. Not even funny as a joke. They really think that we are so stupid?
> Linux lacks ethics
Since 2022 the Russian president is sending 1000 Russians a day to a sure death, could stop the carnage at any time, and couldn't care less about it. Most Russians support him and don't care also. I will not accept any lesson on ethics.
> Since 2022 the Russian president is sending 1000 Russians a day to a sure death, could stop the carnage at any time, and couldn't care less about it. Most Russians support him and don't care also. I will not accept any lesson on ethics.
Could you spell out the exact relevant conditions that you believe disqualify someone from delivering a "lesson on ethics"? It seems a priori unlikely that you could find criteria that are not obviously tortured and self-serving while also granting this qualification to a typical US citizen, especially one who has worked for any major tech company (as is the case for many posters here).
Maybe you should be banned from this discussion forum? After all, you are from the same country that dropped atomic bombs on civilians and remains the only country in history to have done so. Any lesson on ethics from an American is by definition facetious, right?
> This is a win-win for the people banned also, because they are in a vulnerable position to be forced by the Russian regime to commit crimes.
Nonsense.
If your concern is that a maintainer might be strongarmed into getting surreptitious changes in the linux kernel, that's a misplaced concern because:
1- the maintainer in question didn't have access to approve changes across the whole linux kernel, but only on the drivers that they were maintaining (mainly Baikal electronics hardware, I assume. I.e. the Russian government could sabotage the drivers for hardware developed inside Russia itself, not exactly something that we'd truly have to worry about)
2- just because an individual, working in the open and with a clear/known identity (and association with a bankrupt Russian hardware design firm) has been excluded, it doesn't mean that a government might give up trying to sneak in changes. They can just create new personas (just like with "Jia Tan" of xz fame)
I understand that the Linux kernel got their hand forced, but this is just stopping a volunteer from contributing (and feeling welcome), in an open source project in which they had been involved for several years. It's a win for the Linux kernel (because they are not going to get a slap on their wrists), but it's not a win for the affected individuals
They banned people employed by sanctioned organisations from being maintainers. This one worked for a company making hardware for the Russian military.
I'm not arguing for/against the exclusions due to sanctions. I think the benefit of banning people who used to work for a banned entity is minimal, but after all, if they are still using an email address provided by that sanctioned entity (alumni access?) of course they haven't disentangled themselves fully from that entity
This is obviously unfortunate but I think the issue is a lot bigger than Linux. It should serve as a reminder that there are no liberals in war.
The civil liberties you take for granted, in a major war, they will be gone. They will die in one day and it will take decades to get them back if ever. Remember that in WW2 America was throwing Japanese citizens into internment camps and the other side was doing far worse. Things that are unfathomable today but in a war with sufficiently high stakes they will happen again and more.
Even at war, the USA was still much more "liberal" than Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan: for starters, they didn't put any German citizens / German descendants in a concentration camp.
The Japanese descendants/citizens living in the USA were treated different because of racism. You can argue that having a racist government isn't compatible with being "liberal", but it's a matter of degree. Having a democracy that doesn't allow non whites to vote is still more "liberal" than having a monarchy / dictatorship
If you mean "a place where many of a certain category of people are held", then yes, we did. If you mean "place where many of a certain category of people are held and killed", then no, we didn't.
Technically, the first definition is at least as correct as the second one. But colloquially, the second one is what many people understand.
You cannot compare the camps that German citizens were held in by the US to Dachau.
I actually agree with you that the term “concentration camp” is inflammatory and misleading when applied to the internment camps used to hold Axis citizens and Japanese-Americans. But the comment I was replying to was attempting to draw a contrast between the Japanese internment and the treatment of German citizens, when in fact German and Italian citizens were interned during the war. In fact I’ve actually visited one of the internment camps, in Montana.
This is not true and you know it. Re-read Linus' comment if you think this is about sanctioned organizations.
And in any case, the leader of an open project should do everything to keep the project open, including defying an immoral and unjust law, or at the very least doing bare minimum compliance. They certainly shouldn't happily jump on the bandwagon.
Mac apps have never bern restricted to the App Store, so I’m not sure the idea of “sideloading” makes sense to apply there. I still know what you mean though.
They really aren't. Anything signed will load, whether you download it from the App Store or not.
Yes, there are some extra steps involved in loading unsigned programs, and the process is designed to make it sound a bit scary. I think that's the right tradeoff, reasonable people may differ.
But we're talking about the App Store vs. not-the-App-Store, and again, there is nothing which could reasonably be described as a restriction involved in installing the same binary from either of those sources. The only difference is the details of where it comes from and how to install it, and clicking on a dmg or pkg is still a fully-supported workflow with no warnings or other interference.
I, for example , i'm scared of using YouTube alternative clients like re(vanced) et simila, i'm personality scared to have my youtube/gmail account banned.
In case you watch on an Android phone: Newpipe doesn't even use your account, so the possibility of getting banned for it is much smaller.
You can make playlists in it and track your history (locally), so I don't think it's inferior to the official app. On the contrary.
Also, these new Android phones have the option to modify which app opens youtube links by default, so it's easy to just list Newpipe instead of the official app.
The only downside are downtimes a few times per year when YT changes something and Newpipe devs are making a fix, which never took more than a few days.
If you make a new account, they'll only ban that one.
I've been permanently banned from Reddit for really dumb reasons more times than I can count. The first time, I was sad. Now, I know it's a war between users and admins, and an individual account isn't worth very much.
Reddit bans are one thing, but your Gmail/Google Drive account getting banned? Not worth it, not over fucking Youtube ads. Remember, you don't have any recourse against Google bans.
Seems like the better solution would be to get off Gmail and Google Drive if you are otherwise unable to manage that risk. Having your digital life depend on the whims of some company with a TOS that boils down to "we can do whatever we want and you have no recourse" is irresponsible. Watching youtube without ads is hardly the biggest risk factor here.
It's frustrating to see so many people adopting a 'perfect consumer' mentality, where they're more willing to accept limitations on their digital freedom than to explore their options.
Normies were an adaptation for social cohesion of followers of chieftain, it wasn't supposed to scale beyond, say, thousand people, MSM just parasitize on this instinct.
Do you really think it mattered whether the people in Jonestown drank Kool Aid or Flavour Aid? What matters is the poison and both Apple and Google ship plenty of it.
a department of the Indian political party BJP that manages social media campaigns for the party and its members.
According to Washington Post, 150,000 social media workers spread posts aimed at exploiting the fears of India’s Hindu majority across a vast network of WhatsApp groups.
BJP orchestrates online campaigns through its social media cell to intimidate perceived government critics. Sadhavi Khosla, a BJP cyber-volunteer in the BJP IT Cell said that the organisation disseminated misogyny, Islamophobia and hatred.
That's a hell of a propaganda machine you're dealing with there.
i.... am not dealing with it. i threw in the towel when it became unsustainable emotionally and physically.
edit:
i had a relative who was borrowing a photographer friends camera and taking those news worthy shots for lulz and out of sheer boredom. next thing we know, he is on twitter doing some discussion and the was doxed, threatened with calling the cops and his past dug up just because he used a handle that had links to his afk name. it was terrible for him. and i would say it was all state sponsored.
he had to nuke a lot of his online presence and this was around 4years ago when he was around 20. you can imagine.
this was all thanks to that BJP it cell. these minions even say as much because they literally are the law. Paid for by the state so they do represent the power of the state in covering their asses and decimating their virtual opponents.
with regard to our local much smaller propaganda machines, I think (by the fact that I can't reply there) you implicitly received an answer on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41953841
Without the full details of the edit war you were involved in, the scenario seems to be clash between your "world view" and those who reversed your edits. From your username, being from a region where a successful genocide/ethnic cleansing of a minority religious group was conducted by the majority local population only a couple of decades back, the possibility of your edits being controversial to others not necessarily the alleged "BJP it cell" is there.
>genocide/ethnic cleansing of a minority religious group
200 people of that minority were killed.
I do not deny there was a mass exodus but to say a minority was ethnic cleansing is disengenous.
Again, my comment was not about the exodus but regarding the politics regarding the last 500 years and more specifically the last 70-90 odd years of history. That has nothing minority-majority issue you are claiming it out to be.
On the topic of exodus, you know it was the governor who ordered that the minority to be removed from their homes ? I know because I was there. You might not.
Let us put this way. There were a particular group in a region which comprised around 5% of the population. In a year or two, it dropped to effectively 0%. Now the exact terminology to use for this can be taken as genocide or ethnic cleansing or the somewhat passive "mass exodus".
Regarding the edits, I wont attempt to assume that the other side are right. But there is a sensitivity around the politics and history there, with the backdrop of the secessionist movement and the genocide/ethnic cleansing. So can see possibility of differing views there, with conflicting narratives being pushed.
> On the topic of exodus, you know it was the governor who ordered that the minority to be removed from their homes ? I know because I was there. You might not.
Really! A whole population just packed their bags and left their livelihoods, homes and properties to go and live in refugee camps, just because a governor asked them to. And not because gun toting terrorists supported by the local population where roaming around targeting them for rape and murder ? I will take the words of the people who had to flee, rather than those who were complicit in the genocide/ethnic cleansing.
You take the struggle of a region and turn it into a religious struggle (The indigenous movement in the 90's was your username.substring(2) movement), smartly the "majority" there drives out the "minority" and enjoys capture of their properties (oh just a few hundred people who moved out you know, they will not return.). Sadly, you also have the audacity to say only 200 of that minority
Blame it on the Governor (look ma..., a central government appointee did it, was not us). Super convenient. We were just informing peace loving friends from across the border where our neighbours lived. I was there and so I know
As Mahatma Gandhi said, the progress of a state is how it treats its minorities. Guess you made good "progress" treating them "....well...."
Wikipedia lost many good editors over a user named BrownHairedGirl. She single handedly removed extraordinary valuable editors and left a bunch of simps in her wake. The site has never recovered.
Some users even support this these days. From "the law is the law" and "you shouldn't be in business if you can't follow the laws" to "serves them right for having X opinion!"
Dividing the world into normies and others is a very odd way to characterise widespread adoption of anything. I hesitate to use the neckbeard word, but it's got overtones.
There are as many usefully curated sites, as sites where state actors curate content to hide the reptile led barcode truth from the normies.
If you want to split the categories between normies and neckbeards that's good enough a model of the world to understand the issue.
The part that I miss is we had things in public, collaborations between everyone who was interested in spending the time to access the space. This barrier was enough to keep things feeling like a community, with most of the things like this that came up being able to be addressed by internal arguments.
Now everything has to be robust to the idea that you will have neckbeards and normies interacting, and that curation is required. You have passive users, who's eyes are valuable... contributors, with divergent motivation, some pure for the joy of the project, some who want to put their agenda in front of the first group... And even external state actors pushing things at a scale that's hard to understand.
I am probably not part of the "we" you are talking about, but I had no idea "normie" means that, and I couldn't infer it from the comment. In fact I inferred a completely wrong meaning from that comment (something like "unenlightened").
Isn't "normie" a pejorative word (genuine question)?
This was the basis of my response too. It's almost never said by people in contexts where it's not pejorative, to my understanding. It's a staple of incels and the elite Mensa types. It dismisses the average lived experience because iamveryspecial.
It generally refers to a group of “normal” people. E.g in some context they are an “out” group that does not have some specialized knowledge or understanding that the “in” group would have. So it can be negative, but it generally just means someone inexperienced with the given topic area. There is an implication of otherness to using the term “normie” for the group using it but it is generally a pretty common term now. For example, imagine a bunch of policy wonks debating something in highly specific language and then someone asks “how would the normies react?” They mean, “how would people unfamiliar with the inner workings of political policy react?” Stuff like that.
It does have a negative connotation for that group in some contexts, but the usage is pretty common and softened now.
Why? It’s a salient distinction when talking about mass-adoption of technology. Social dynamics change dramatically when the ratio of neckbeards to normies is upset. I don’t like these terms either, but “neckbeards and normies” has a nice alliterative quality.
Or more recent and a very good movie (imdb all time #61) is Lives of Others about trying to smuggle some info out of East Germany. And a million other examples.
The internet has made things much easier as the tech is hard to censor.
Judging by the various misinformation legislation they're rushing to adopt, yes. The free internet said too many things that powerful people didn't like.
It's hardly the only especially bad country though. At this point the entire western world is pushing for it (and Russia/China are already one and two steps ahead respectively).
I'm already annoyed I have to wipe my devices whenever I travel there or risk a $5000 fine and maybe jail time if they want the password and I don't give it up.
Australia has to be the least free country in the anglosphere.
What? The US has been pulling this crap since 9/11, so I'm not sure what you're going on about IRT the Anglo-Sphere.
The US only has privacy rights for Americans. As a non-citizen traveler, they routinely belittle, humiliate, and violate such privacy, demanding access to people's phones at risk of detention (or at best being sent back home) being exactly one of the things they do. Ask almost any Canadian what they think about the border in the last 20 years.
I've also had them mock and belittle me for no reason ("what event are you going to?" "that sounds stupid."), just petty stuff.
I wipe my personal data when traveling to the US, which I pretty much only do for work. (And likely won't even do that anymore if Nov 5 goes to Trump)
> so I'm not sure what you're going on about IRT the Anglo-Sphere.
Australia is worse than the US for this, and worse than any other anglo country.
> The US only has privacy rights for Americans.
Yes, and Australia doesn't even have privacy rights for Australians. Hence worse.
> As a non-citizen traveler, they routinely belittle, humiliate, and violate such privacy, demanding access to people's phones at risk of detention (or at best being sent back home) being exactly one of the things they do. Ask almost any Canadian what they think about the border in the last 20 years.
The Australian border force isn't any better for this, you just don't see it because I presume you're an Australian citizen. The UK and Canada can be pretty bad as well. Shitty border personal are not unique to the US.
> I wipe my personal data when traveling to the US, which I pretty much only do for work.
The difference in the US is if you are a citizen or green card holder you can tell them to go suck eggs, and the worst they can do is confiscate your device.
In Australia, even if you're a citizen, you face IIRC a $5000 fine and possibly some jail time. So that's much worse.
> They need a legal basis and they are required to cite that:
What is the bar for a legal basis? In practice it seems equivalent to the way cops claim to smell weed as grounds for a search.
> In my experience and by my reading of performance stats US Border force are far more intrusive and over bearing than Australian Border forces.
Anecdotes will be anecdotes, but I flew in and out of the US for years before becoming a citizen and never had issues. Honestly I found UK immigration to be the rudest and most intrusive but that was just my experience.
Also stats don't mean much since IIRC Australia stopped recording or at least making public the number of devices they search.
A blog article from a law firm isn't a great source here, especially when contrasted with the numerous accounts of people that have been forced to unlock their devices without legal basis.
> In any case, you're free to challenge, etc. See link.
Not if a 'legal basis' is claimed.
> Like most people then. Whether crossing US or Australian borders.
Yup.
> So Australia's not the worst "anglo country" then?
Is the term anglosphere such an unfamiliar term you had to put anglo country in quotes?
Australia is the worst country when it comes to searching devices without justification, objectively going by laws and user experiences.
The UK is the worst country for being treated with a lack of respect and being asked intrusive questions in my experience.
> Do you recall correctly? Did Australia stop?
You're being overly defensive, lad.
Maybe put your patriotism/tribalism aside while having this discussion?
I read a few articles recently that said Australia had stopped recorded, so yes, fairly certain I am recalling correctly but not about to go and look it up either.
This seemed to be a fairly explicit case of “I hate traveling to Australia because of so and so”.
Sure, it’s retarded in general, but that was not what I was talking/asking about.
They apparently both have a need to travel to Australia, _and_ data on their PC that requires wiping. That makes me curious what kind of data that could be.
You continue to miss the point. But if you're happy handing over your personal data, and your stance is representative of most Australians, that's probably why privacy protections are so weak in Australia - most don't understand why they should care.
The wider Anglosphere is pushing this too. One organization behind it in both the UK and the US is the UK Labour Party. Yes, you read that correctly - high level Labour party operatives formed a nonprofit in the US to lobby for misinformation legislation, to ban X, and to pressure various other websites into deleting content.
> CCDH also held meetings with federal legislators while pushing for “change in USA” toward a censorious proposal it calls the “STAR framework,” which would create an “independent digital regulator” that could “impose consequences for harmful content.” STAR’s core concepts are similar to Europe’s just-instituted Digital Services Act and Britain’s even more stringent Online Safety Act, which puts the national media regulator Ofcom in charge of determining fines for uncooperative platforms.
The whole article is worth a read, where many people were targeted for innocuous stuff or in at least one case, for reporting on an article in JAMA:
Those europeans (and it definitely is not all europeans or even close to it if that is what you are insinuating) should first look at what their own governments are doing.
It's not just governments. It's people that support grandiose efforts against "misinformation", "disinformation" and "malinformation".
> Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
People don't have energy to hear wrong and dangerous opinions anymore. Everything dangerous to the current order should be banned, otherwise fascism is inevitable.
Yes. People who want to control the information want to distribute misinformation freely and be guaranteed nobody can contest them. That's the link. The censors always will be the liars, because once you can control who can say what, it is impossible to resist the temptation to lie a little bit for a good cause. And then a little bit more. We have seen it happen many, many times.
Have we? I can only think of wartime censorship (which, even if it was sold for protection from enemy propaganda, was always about morale, so doesn't apply here), and authoritarian regimes, which also don't apply here.
Yes, we have. Those same people who whine about "misinformation" are repeatedly caught lying to the public - for the public's benefit, of course, which they get to define. Which only makes sense - if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselves, and needs a gatekeeper class to define it for them, then it's only a little step from that to deciding the public is not smart enough to make correct decisions based on facts, and needs to be manipulated by the same gatekeeper class by telling them what they need to hear, for their own good. Again, this happened many times just in the recent years.
> Again, this happened many times just in the recent years.
Again, when? Concrete examples if there are so many!
> if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselve
I mean, whatever one thinks of censorship this is objectively true. We have flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, people who drank bleach against Covid, people who believe Ukraine started the war against Russia, the pizzagate nonsense, people who believe in the magical powers of rhino horns and shark fin soups and on and on and on. There are, objectively, a lot of very stupid and/or impressionable people out there in the world.
We were told mass surveillance against US citizens doesn't happen. It did and still is.
We were told healthcare reform will not force people to change their insurance coverage and healthcare providers. It turned out to be "a lie of the year".
We were told US law enforcement supplying guns to drug cartels is crazy talk. It was true.
We were told FBI, CIA and DOJ heads would never lie to the Congress. They did, and suffered no consequences.
We were told the inflation is a temporary phenomenon that is going to go away very quickly, and is insignificant. It never did, and was very significant.
We were told the hypothesis of COVID originating from Wuhan lab leaks is insane fantasy which no scientists have ever believed and it has no evidence at all behind it. It turned out to be not so.
We were told migration restrictions as a way to reduce the impact of the pandemic is a racist bigotry. Then in a short time it became a mandatory policy.
We were told masks are useless and nobody but medical workers should use them. Then there were mandated for everyone.
We were told COVID is nothing to worry about and is less dangerous than the flu. Then 2020-21 happened.
We were told lockdowns are vital and even sole person daring to go to an empty beach should be arrested because it is necessary to prevent millions of deaths. Then the same people endorsed mass protests where thousands of people gathered together.
We were told 2020 protests were "mostly peaceful". They were anything but.
We were told we need just a two week lockdown to flatten the curve. It turned to be many months.
We were told closing the schools is absolutely necessary or our kids will die. It turned out not to be so.
We were told COVID vaccines prevent the spread of the virus. They did not.
We were told Hunter laptop is a Russian disinformation operation. It wasn't.
We were told rumors of US government working with social media companies to censor dissenting opinions are total lies. Until the documents confirmed that's exactly what happened.
We were told rumors of Joe Biden being unfit to rule are absolutely false and he's never going to be replaced as a candidate. He was.
These are just some random examples, only from recent years, I could have many more, especially if I dug deeper into the modern history. The press and the government are lying to us constantly, incessantly, brazenly. And the only way we even know they do and can challenge them on it is because they don't yet have the total control over the information. And that's why they want it.
> There are, objectively, a lot of very stupid and/or impressionable people out there in the world.
There are. But that doesn't mean some self-appointed guys that get paid for bloviating in public are now some magic geniuses that have the right to tell us all how it really is. They do not possess any such capacity and they are just as fallible as the rest of us. Except that they have been already caught, many times, lying to us.
Media has always been salacious nonsense — at least, judging from the 1880s English newspapers I’ve read as part of a research writing class: they’re full of complete lies about Jack the Ripper, for instance.
Most of the discussion from government is using that perennial fact to justify suppressing true information — eg, suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story or people’s personal experiences with the COVID vaccine. Even though that collapsed both trust in media and trust in medical institutions.
To add to the sibling comment about the courts, from Wiki:
> Starting in 2021, news outlets began to authenticate some of the contents of the laptop. In 2021, Politico verified two key emails used in the Post's initial reporting by cross-referencing emails with other datasets and contacting their recipients. CBS News published a forensic analysis which examined a "clean" copy of the data obtained directly from Mac Isaac. It concluded that the "clean" data, including over 120,000 emails, originated with Hunter Biden and had not been altered
This whole thing is sounding alot like the one about Bill Murray, the son of famous atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair (not the famous one from SNL).
His mom really influenced his behavior, so it has to be a conspiracy: William J. Murray III is an American Baptist minister, and social conservative lobbyist. Murray serves as the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, a non-profit organization in Washington, D.C. that lobbies Congress on issues related to aiding Christians in Islamic and Communist countries.
It's fascinating to see the true believer. It's like those cult members that stayed in the cult when the day of the end of the world came and passed and nothing happened. They just said "well, it's probably going to happen next year". It's both sad and fascinating - there's literally nothing too ridiculous that people couldn't believe given the opportunity.
> The laptop and some of its contents played a visible role in federal prosecutors’ case against the president’s son, who was charged with lying on a firearm application in 2018 by not disclosing his drug use. A prosecutor briefly held up the laptop before the jury in Delaware, and an F.B.I. agent later testified that messages and photos on it and in personal data that Mr. Biden had saved in cloud computing servers had made his drug use clear.
Incredible that in this comment thread there are suggestions the Biden government is fascist, even though Biden allowed his son to be prosecuted but if the reverse happened Trump would obviously interfere.
Federal prosecutors tried to make an extremely favorable plea deal with Hunter Biden that granted immunity to a host of crimes he wasn’t charged with. The judges ended up throwing it out.
Don’t rule out a lame duck pardon, either. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton pardoned their ne’er-do-well relatives, and it’s very common for Presidents to issue pardons during their final days in office.
Biden was asked if he would pardon his son, and he said no. But this is entirely beside the point, because Trump would pardon his son without a second thought and Trump supporters wouldn't blink.
Yeah the party spent weeks arguing with him to put the country before his desire to be a two term president. Something Trump is far too egotistical to do. But this is entirely beside the point, because the Democrat politicians are held to a far higher standard than the Republicans politicians are, especially Trump.
It's weird how every single example of supposed suppression of information is something like "hunter Biden laptop" that has been reported in news ad nauseam.
The Hunter Biden laptop story is highly improbable and has many typical hallmarks of Russian Disinformation. It also happens to be true. That is all there is to it.
They were always like this. 20 years of state funded education doesn't go into depth on this topic though. 1984 is a warning about a possible future tyranny, right?
We must work to build an inter[dark]net which ideally fully divorces the user from the government and laws of the country the user is physically in (unless the user leaks his dox).
I can't imagine the kind of people it will attract. 5% of sane people and 95% doing the most hideous things in mankind.
Law and Govs are not so bad that we should get rid of it. They do add value to society compared to a fully lawless anarchic community/tools/etc. There is a place where freedom does have to stop and trespassing that frontier will have consequences.
We don't need to through all our laws and Gov (especially in Western countries where really it's not so bad). But instead, we need better law, law enforcement, etc... The key part is it's up to us to fight for it.
I mean it's a pretty fundamental tenet of liberty that you have the freedom to do things only to the extent that you don't harm others.
And it's a simple consequence of scaling that the more massively you scale a communication system like the internet the more pathways there are for person A to harm person B.
So naturally there end up being more cases evaluating harm that involve the internet. Some of those cases will involve ordinary judicial things like injunctions.
And all of that is true regardless of whether you believe any one particular injunction is justified or unjustified. It's just a matter of what happens at scale.
You can, of course, try to give up the notion that liberty ends when you start causing harm, and many people have gone down that path. But for those of us who are still in the liberty camp, these questions are difficult and involve weighing a number of concerns and claims. And anyone who thinks they have easy answers is probably just deeply confused or high on rhetoric.
The problem here is how you define harm. "Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words shall never hurt me." used to be the commonly accepted Wisdom, and with that definition you don't need to controll what others are allowed to say. I don't think it's a coincidence that governments are all to happy to get rid of that sentiment for exposing their lies does harm them.
Not sure what cases you are referring to, but “Hurt feelings” in India have caused multiple riots, resulting in utter carnage, spilling over to years, decades longs strings of terrorism and reprisals against minorities.
Feelings are the reason people get up to live in the morning.
I get why we used to make that statement. In a way it’s about rationality mattering, and how feelings being hurt are different from actual hurt.
In the context of this conversation, I’ll argue its an un-pragmatic dismissal of a pertinent fact.
I’ll make this argument: “At the scales we are talking, and across the breath of human cultures, feelings end up mattering.”
That's the kind of lame excuse that fascists and elitists always resort to in order to increase their power and shut down speech they dislike. Freedom of expression is absolutely essential to the long-term future of humanity. If preserving that fundamental human right means that some emotionally fragile people start riots then so be it, that is an acceptable cost.
Are you saying that hurt feelings aren't harm? Words can hurt too you know, e.g. popular black footballers getting racist abuse anytime they go online is harmful to their mental health; trans people being told to kill themselves because they're Satan's spawn and pedophiles and what not also take severe hits to their mental health.
Pain is different from harm you know. When people's feelings are hurt by truth or even just my existence as a "white male" then sorry but that is not me harming you but you refusing to grow up.
Anyway, I'll believe that "progressives" actually care about how others feel when they start treating those not on board with their ideology with anything other than scorn or schadenfreude.
> When people's feelings are hurt by truth or even just my existence as a "white male" then sorry but that is not me harming you but you refusing to grow up
And this is of course not what anyone is talking about, thanks for the useless strawman. It's stuff like football players being told to die, compared to monkeys, and mannequins with their names being hanged from bridges (Vinicius Jr) only because their skin colour is black. Or monkey chants and bananas being thrown at them.
There is a critical principle in English common law: de minimus non curat lex.
Paraphrased, the law does not concern itself with trifles. Mean words causing hurt feelings qualify. I acknowledge that it can be a very big deal for the person on the receiving end: it's the sort of thing we should (and do) socially discourage, or moderate (or not) at the platform level.
But no, I don't think it rises to the level of harm, in that there should be no remedy under law, criminal nor tortuous.
you need to acknowledge the difference between telling you to kill yourself vs killing you. One is clearly more harmful than the other.
then imagine living with free speech vs with no free speech. One is clearly better.
combining the two ideas, there is always going to be a gray zone in the middle. It is not obvious at all that where you want to draw the line is optimal.
It's just politics... Replace "open internet" with "land" and imagine countries (ie people) are attempting to block others access to some resource. It was naive to assume that the internet wouldn't adhere the nature of our reality.
The problem isn't that we "see scarcity", it's that we intentionally introduce scarcity. You can make more money with scarcity. It's a lot harder to make any money without scarcity, even.
Instead of Napster letting you download any song anyone ever bothered to digitize, we now have a dozen different music streaming services giving you access to the music from whichever publishers they managed to sign deals with and you have to pay a monthly fee and can only use a number of devices at the same time and not share with friends and family unless they also pay for the access.
Yes, of course there are good reasons for this: without paying, the artists don't get paid and that means making music becomes no more than an expensive hobby and yadda yadda but that's my point: we may have corporeal justifications for the scarcity we impose on the Internet but the scarcity exists and we deliberately created it and use the police and military to enforce it.
In fact, the most valuable resource on the internet is finite: atention with the possibility of influence those who give it to you. This is already a question of national security.
Clearly you miss the point or don't understand politics, if you think the matter or comparison I made has anything to do with finitism. Politics has everything to do with conflicts in wants. For example, some people want free speech, and other people don't want other people to be able to spread lies or what they perceive as lies. Do you see how these wants are at odds with each other, or that two people can have opposing wants? Such conflicts can arise wherever humans interact with each other, and the internet isn't different somehow because it is less finite. I mean, do you think there aren't people out there who don't want to police the internet?
Simply, put, politics is not limited to matters of finitism. And the example I gave, is a perfectly fitting example of where politics is evident.
>>> Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
Yes, naive to think that we could live in a world without fences. The internet makes it very cheap to tear down fences. Yet, good fences make for good neighbors. It was always naive to think that governments would let a torn-fences world, remain untouched.
Internet transitioned from a fun toy for nerds to a serious tool used by the masses, and needs to be regulated accordingly. Looking back, it was extremely naive to think that even though we regulate every single aspect of social life, the internet would remain the bastion of freedom just because it would be cool if it did. Think about all the rules we have about what can and what cannot be said not to break social cohesion on TV, or radio, or newspaper, or street sidewalk, or workplace, or family gathering - the internet is moving in the same direction. The anarchy was never meant to last.
> And neither do we need regulation for what I can say at a family gathering or on the street
It's slightly different, since you don't do your banking, taxes, business, information gathering at that family gathering; nor can malicious actor effortlessly spam misinformation/scams at every family gathering/street.
Especially considering we know multiple countries have extremely active operations online trying to sway opinions their way, it's naive to compare the internet to a neutral public place.
1. The Streisand effect. No-one on HN gave a monkeys about this dodgy news agency till today. Now half of us have read the archive about how they promote propaganda & fake news. Your reputation takes a hit
2. There is no absolute definition of “freedom”. Wikipedia is a fantastic resource for humanity in general and I think should be defended. But as more and more of humanity come to live more and more online, then the legal and cultural norms will shift and shuffle - courts for two hundred years have assumed they can order anyone in their jurisdiction around and often not in their jurisdiction- and that’s kind of the point of courts. So what is freedom? It’s what we the demos and the courts agree …
3. An example is in the order (I mean on the Streisand effect - when the %#}#% hell would I ever read a court order from India ?!) - it says “herein to take down/delete” - this bespeaks a failure to understand the world on the level of “who are the Beatles”. Take down - fine this is part of how we agree norms and limits of courts. Delete. Are you kidding me. Does that imply from everywhere else? Wow.
Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information. Everyone can write things there, including people with biases and conflicting interests. Their rules about editing are really annoying and unfair, they don't care about facts.
I enjoy reading Wikipedia sometimes, but it's a broken system, a lot of truths missing in it's articles because of crap editors and political propaganda. Also it's admins are toxic and abuse their little power they have over every editor there.
Try editing some articles there, and you will see the dark side of Wikipedia.
> Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information.
It's about as reliable it gets. It cites sources, has whole history available, has little conflicts of interest and has transparent editorial guidelines and process.
Many people are probably shocked to find views in WP that aren't aligned with what their newsmedia reports and frames.
The key point, which perfectionists miss or more likely just don't agree with, is about being less wrong. WP is time and again show to be less wrong than supposedly trusted or more formal resources.
When it started many people would look to the Encyclopedia Britannica as more reliable yet research showed that on average it contained more errors and that's with the occasional inexperienced/ rogue editor on the WP side.
Wikipedia is often wrong once you stray from mainstream topics. Subspecialties often have 1-2 super-contributors, whose blind spots and misunderstandings become part of Wikipedia. Plenty of articles also have no actual citations of their technical content.
Nobody says Wikipedia is perfect. The fact that you can point out that certain content are wrong proves what the GP said — “[It] has whole history available, has little conflicts of interest and has transparent editorial guidelines and process.”
It’s also worth pointing out that it could be you who has blind spots, not the contributors. And if you’re certain they are wrong you can always try to correct them, or create a competing topic?
> Wikipedia is often wrong once you stray from mainstream topics.
So it’s a good source for topics with the largest audience. That alone shows how beneficial it can be. At the very least, it’s a good starting point for further research.
> And if you’re certain they are wrong you can always try to correct them, or create a competing topic?
I’ve tried that before, and it’s often not worth the time. The lord of the article is often an expert Wikipedia Editor and rules lawyer with endless time to argue and revert even when they have no expert or even basic knowledge about the subject.
In order to maintain some semblance of process, Wikipedia has to approximate what is true by relying on the consensus from reputable sources, not reality itself. This means that experts are often not who you want editing an article, because experts are often poorly positioned to know what the general public knows, and what consensus is from outside their area of expertise. E.g., I have published research that contradicts information on Wikipedia, and while I am of course convinced I and my co-authors are right while Wikipedia is wrong, I would much rather have that state of affairs than a world where Wikipedia is written by everyone with a paper on a subject, and the line is drawn at whoever was the most recent editor.
> experts are often not who you want editing an article, because experts are often poorly positioned to know what the general public knows, and what consensus is from outside their area of expertise.
I would argue the opposite, since consensus from reputable sources is not the same as consensus of the general public, and unless it's a subject of study in multiple fields, the consensus in their field is their area of expertise.
Academic scholarship is generally preferred over lay sources, though there are caveats and individual instances of primary research are rarely considered indicative of consensus (usually review articles and other secondary sources are significantly preferred). However, if you do disagree with any information on Wikipedia, even if it's based on only your own primary research, I would strongly encourage you to at least tag the statements with a {{dubious}} or {{disputed inline}}[1] tag so that it can be discussed, or make an edit request[2] if you're not comfortable making the change yourself.
That's the propaganda Wikipedia wants you to think, citing itself.
In practice, it doesn't work. The bias and delusional behavior of the editors is infectious, widespread, and has even been criticized by Wikipedia's own co-founder Larry Sanger as being overrun by "left-wing propaganda essays." He even went as far as to call it the "most biased encyclopedia in history" in an interview with Glenn Greenwald. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR6dO8U8okk)
Frankly, it does seem (following stereotypes) that left-wing people have a stronger tendency to be writers from being white-collar; while more right-wing folks are too busy with blue-collar jobs and physical labor to be writing rebuttals. A very simple example is how Wikipedia approves Vox, Slate, The Nation, Mother Jones, Jezebel, The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Jacobin as sources, but Fox News is considered "unreliable." Permitting Jacobin and Jezebel, but not Fox, is delusional. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...)
Every source you list as "approved" either isn't listed as perennial at all (which makes me wonder, how did it end up on your list?), or has explicit carve-outs saying that statements need to be attributed due to bias. Meanwhile, Fox has had thorough discussion showing that there are substantial problems with their factual reporting on politics and science, that using them as attributed opinion sources is still fine, and that non-politics or science reporting should be examined critically but can be used. Particularly given the documents now publicly available on their handling of election coverage pretty clearly demonstrating an intentional distinction between what they think is true behind closed doors vs. reporting presented as reality (a distinction they ultimately had to admit in court), what grounds is there to dispute this policy?
Maybe you could clarify your concern by pointing to something where the public consensus from reputable sources is distinct from what Wikipedia presents, by matter of policy?
I am not going to value the other sources, as I don't know some of them, but considering Fox News "unreliable" is even tame. You are better informed if you simply not watch news at all:
> It’s also worth pointing out that it could be you who has blind spots, not the contributors. And if you’re certain they are wrong you can always try to correct them, or create a competing topic?
No, it's not me who has the blind spots in the cases I have seen, sorry. Also, they are not worth the work to correct, since the overlord of the niche is usually someone with far too much time on their hands to argue, even when presented with incontrovertible proof. They also often have "Wikipedia editing" as a hobby, and know all the nitpicking rules of the site that they will use against you if you encroach on their domain. And yes, I tried this once for an obvious error in a math article (with no citation in the original article, mind you).
> So it’s a good source for topics with the largest audience.
Also not for topics of any political bent, but sure, if your target audience is at a high school level or below and you can separate out the facts from the editorialization, it's not bad.
At this point, I want Encyclopedia Britannica back. I would take it any day of the week over Wikipedia. The golden age of Wikipedia, when that was reversed, seems to be over.
And some of the actual citations are to easily hyperlinked pop science articles and opinion pieces, sometimes actually replacing more accurate unsourced material...
I'm honestly more concerned with how Wikipedia handles mainstream topics - i.e. the ones its editors are likely to have strong opinions about. Misunderstandings can be corrected with time, dogma on the other hand actively fights any correction.
I would take almost ANY real encyclopaedia, any day, for very general topics. For specifics, I would go to specific literature, or just google it to find sources myself. Often what I search is either wrong, or for example math or physics things are written in a sooo complex form, that I just cannot do anything with it.
It sounds like you're accusing Wikipedia of being both too easy to edit ("everyone can write things there") and too restrictive about who can edit ("they don't care about facts... Crap editors and political propaganda.") It sounds like your real criticism is that Wikipedia has biases and won't let you correct them. Can you provide links to some examples of bias on Wikipedia so that we can make up for ourselves how bad this is?
Here is an example of a Wikipedia admin who spent years harassing a blogger (and a community the blogger belongs to), and it took a lot of effort and a lot of luck to make other admins admit that this was a bad thing and that it should stop.
(This is not the worst example I know of, but it is an example where Wikipedia changed its mind later, so you can agree that this was bad even if you trust Wikipedia.)
I mostly fact check and do notable research for obscure Wikipedia articles. This is usually a no drama environment sure I have helped delete articles that later became notable and removed true facts lacking sources. Many of these things have fixed themselves over time. My biggest fear with Wikipedia is citogenesis https://xkcd.com/978/ I have found one in a major news paper, this took three months to take down.
There has been a little bit of furor in some circles in Japan, regarding the status of Yasuke, who was a favorite of Oda Nobunaga, whether he was a samurai or not. Around September of 2015, a user by the name tottoritom made numerous edits to the Yasuke article, citing to yet-to-be-published papers by Thomas Lockley. Coincidentally, tottoritom's user page introduces himself as Thomas Lockley too, and Lockley happened to also have lived in Tottori. After some time, the citations were changed to refer to a book that Lockley published in Japan (in Japanese). (Now, if the two are indeed one and same person, he has broken a Wikipedia rule on not publishing original research.)
The book become a basis for a romanticized novel he published for western audiences, which I believe inspired the production of Netflix animation for the same character. From then on, the view that Yasuke was a samurai gained foothold, which caught some Japanese historians off-guard.
He's also had his hand on the Britannica article of the same title, and now Wikipedia cites the Britannica article too, thus completing the cycle.
I find it odd that Yasuke would be a Samurai, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of the three unifiers and a general under Nobunaga, was not.
After unifying Japan in 1590, Toyotomi Hideyoshi did not become Shogun because he was born a peasant. Only Samurai could become Shogun, and Hideyoshi was famously not one. You couldn't become a samurai, you had to be born one.
I edit a bit and it seems mostly accurate but I've followed covid origins for a while and the bit "While other explanations, such as speculations that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory have been proposed, such explanations are not supported by evidence." isn't really true. There is evidence but for some reason they only want to cite papers from the scientific establishment saying the scientific establishment is innocent.
Anything even slightly controversial across political lines cannot be trusted. Math and technical topics that don't address any drama or controversy are usually fine for reference, but there are almost always better resources if you're trying to learn about a topic from scratch.
No. I usually edit directly in Wikipedia, my edits are sourced and uncontroversial I try not to deal with the bureaucracy. I took the time to contact the original news outlet and they did the correction pretty fast, Wikipedia had been referencing a secondary sources and those were not that helpful. About five emails, maybe four hours of my time.
> Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information. Everyone can write things there, including people with biases and conflicting interests. Their rules about editing are really annoying and unfair, they don't care about facts.
This is what lecturers and teachers a tell us.
Yet it’s far and away the most accurate and comprehensive resource I know of. When I search the few topics I think I deeply understand, it’s very rarely wrong. I corrected the last error I found.
It was a small one and wouldn’t have tripped the unwary.
Something can be technically correct, yet unreliable. How? Simply by reporting with a bias. The easiest example would be to look at a left (or right) leaning but accurate news organization like Vox or WSJ - they’re absolutely great at many topics, but read only one of the two and you’d have a slightly distorted view of everything. Being unbiased is incredibly hard even for newspapers, let alone a volunteer run org.
For a more specific example of wiki’s biases, think of the average Reddit bias - like their insistence of “if you can’t prove it it doesn’t exist”. A lot of people in the world would be very sad if they learnt that their god supposedly vanished.
The name of the Streisand effect is from exactly the situation of a photo nobody cared about of Streisand's house from decades ago. The fact that it can be superficially referenced is evidence of its longevity.
Not sure. Hardly anyone would remember if Streisand was a singer or actor or whoever. Now her name is mostly tied to Streisand effect, not the art she had produced.
I agree with your point of view. Maybe it was effective when it was the first effect. Like the million pixel website. Now there are million balls in the air. There are lot of current things going on. People will move on when they get tired. And the only memory they will have is "something happened".
I understand that Wikipedia has done this to not lose the possibility to appeal the court's decision. However, if the appeal is not successful and ANI wins, I think Wikipedia should just block India completely. I believe that will blow up spectacularly in ANI's face if everyone comes to know the reason for the block.
Right now only a few people in India know about the ongoing dispute between ANI and Wikipedia. A country-level block is going to bring everyone's attention to the issue which I don't think is something ANI and the incumbent party (the BJP) would want to happen.
India routinely blocks many websites, including many porn sites, but blocking something as big, popular and useful as Wikipedia is not going to go unnoticed by the Indian media.
If possible it would be better to let India block wikipedia themselves, that way the government doesn't get to shift blame on Wikipedia. Whichever way it goes the government has a lot of control over the narrative and it's a lot harder for them to hide that it is their decision to block wikipedia completely.
Governments do not hesitate to blatantly shift blame. For instance, Russian internet censorship agency blocks YouTube for a couple of months and they still pretend that it is Google's technical issue:
I’m a bit surprised Google is still serving at Russia, are they doing it to avoid loosing browser and search market share? They could not be making any money on advertising there, I assume?
I think it would be okay to implement country-specific article bans, but make them obvious. Like, if you are from India and visit the forbidden page, you get a large text "this article is banned in India", maybe with some smaller text explaining that it happened as a result of a court order, with a hyperlink, etc.
However, the article is still there in the database, and everyone not in India can see it. And anyone in India can ask a foreign friend to send them a copy. (Maybe someone will make a website on a different domain that will contain the banned articles from Wikipedia, making them visible for everyone.)
Basically, comply with the bans in a Streisand-effect way.
India can just block those other websites without too much fuss and not everyone has foreign friends or the technical expertise to get around the contry block themselves - and even if they do it they might not care enough. Best would be to ignore the court demand completely and force India's hand to either block Wikipedia entirely or stop their bs.
> popular and useful as Wikipedia is not going to go unnoticed by the Indian media.
without dwelling into the nuances of this case and who's on the right, it would be myopic to think that the block is not a realistic possibility.
it has been over 4 years since the TikTok ban (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23679286), and while it might be apple and oranges, it does not remove from the fact that a major site was blocked, reported widely, and is still standing to this day.
Wait and watch. Wikipedia will do anything but never leave India. It’s a funny world we live in where foreign NGOs and “organisations with good intentions” operate to control opinions of the biggest set of people in a shady neo-colonialistic manner. BBC’s antics in India should be studied in detail. NGOs and portals like caravan that sprang up out of nowhere and “stay relevant with little public support” (key phrase), serve one-sided narratives which people are now seeing through hence they elected the same leadership a third time (almost unprecedented). These narratives from BBC, Caravan are what Wikipedia uses to back their claims. They are upset that their multiple attempts at painting a leader as a perpetrator of mass genocide don’t stick in the minds of people.
> if the appeal is not successful and ANI wins, I think Wikipedia should just block India completely.
Let me see if I understand this correctly. It seems below is the sequence of events you are advocating for:
1. Wikipedia is allowed to legally represent themselves in the court of law.
2. Court looks at the case presented by ANI and Wikipedia, and decides that ANI is right and Wikipedia is wrong
3. Wikipedia should take this out on average Indian citizens, and make them pay because Wikipedia was found to be at fault in a court of law.
This[0] is the Wikipedia article that ANI has beef with. The claims of propaganda are all supported by ample secondary sources from Indian news organizations like Caravan Magazine and the Ken.
ANI wants Wikipedia to provide the names of the editors that added the details to the article. Once Wikipedia reveals those names, ANI will presumably sue them for defamation and force them to remove their contributions. While the edit history will remain, few are likely to read it.
Suing the editors and forcing them to retract their edits on Wikipedia will have a chilling effect on anyone Indian that tries to point out what ANI and similar organizations are doing. But if Wikipedia blocks India and the issue blows up in the media, ANI will be forced to back off and the article will stay up. Wikipedia then unblocks India. Is it a given that things are going to pan out this way? No, but it's quite likely.
They’re complying within the rules fully, but if they decide the rules are too onerous or compromising on their core mission, the legally correct thing to do is to take their ball and go home.
The rest of us not in India don’t want to be affected by the rulings of a Delhi court.
If the citizens of India don’t like this outcome, it’s up to them to fix it.
Agreed. Nothing wrong with it. I was just trying to fully understand what the other commenter said.
If following the law is such a burden on them then they should by all means pack up and leave. This is also what the Delhi High Court said after Wikipedia chose to ignore its order. This applies to all western institutions and corporations. If the expectation is that, Indian courts and the Indian public should continue to bend over then that is not going to happen.
> The rest of us not in India don’t want to be affected by the rulings of a Delhi court.
How wikipedia choses to follow rulings of Delhi High Court is not India's problem. This is 100% on wikipedia to implement it without a geo block, so maybe you should take this up with Wikipedia.
> If the expectation is that, Indian courts and the Indian public should continue to bend over then that is not going to happen.
That's a pretty aggressive stance on this that is not warranted. Wikipedia is pursuing its mission of providing an uncensored source of information created by an open community for the public. Posing the situation as aggressively as you have makes it seem as if you are the one trying to make someone or something "bend over" (or whatever gross turn of phrase you'd like to use).
> (or whatever gross turn of phrase you'd like to use).
This makes it seem like your reply isn't in good faith.
So feel free to twist my words as you please, add your own interpretations to it, and accuse me of whatever you want to accuse me with. I am done discussing this topic with you specifically.
I was being sarcastic to the other commenter because I see complete withdrawal of Wikipedia from India as an absurd overreaction to what this case is about. That is what the parent comment is calling for, specifically, I quote "Wikipedia should just block India completely."
As to my reply to your comment, I recognize Wikipedia's right to not conduct their business in India if they chose to do so, for whatever reason. I interpret your comment as saying that there would be nothing wrong in Wikipedia exercising this right - which I agree with. So I stated my point earnestly that while I agree there is nothing wrong in exercising this right. It seems what it amounts to is that either the court rules in their favor, or they withdraw from India. If that is the expectation that India courts should just rule in their favor (even when they are in the wrong), then I am sorry but that is not acceptable.
Hope that clarifies things. Either way, I am going to withdraw from this discussion as well
Maybe not block it themselves, but put a prominent notice at the top linking to the case and article and see what the Indian government will do next. :)
I don't think that will help a lot. This my opinion, but I think most Indians treat western sources such as NYT, BBC to be biased/racist against India. If wikipedia were to put a banner on top, it would just end up being another entry in that list.
"In July 2024, ANI filed a lawsuit against Wikimedia Foundation in the Delhi High Court — claiming to have been defamed in its article on Wikipedia — and sought ₹2 crore (US$240,000) in damages.[16][17][18] On 5 September, the Court threatened to hold Wikimedia guilty of contempt for failing to disclose information about the editors who had made changes to the article and warned that Wikipedia might be blocked in India upon further non-compliance. The judge on the case stated "If you don't like India, please don't work in India... We will ask government to block your site".[19][20] In response, Wikimedia emphasized that the information in the article was supported by multiple reliable secondary sources.[21] Justice Manmohan said "I think nothing can be worse for a news agency than to be called a puppet of an intelligence agency, stooge of the government. If that is true, the credibility goes."[22]"
I suppose that this might not be the most objective article on Wikipedia. I don't have context for these statements. The way that Wikipedia quotes the judge makes it sound like he's threatening to order the Indian government to block Wikipedia because Wikipedia says that ANI is government propaganda. Is that really what's going on? If so it seems extremely ironic, to the point of tacitly admitting ANI's links to the Indian government. I know hacker news has many Indian readers; can they provide some context or an alternative perspective?
No. You read the statements right. Indian judges tend to give such statements, sometimes even worse. For example, recently one judge in unrelated case gave a statement that “criminalising marital rape is bit harsh”.
The main problem in this case is that Wikimedia hasn’t complied YET with high court orders of revealing people who did the edits. ANI just went ahead and filed contempt of court case before Wiki legal team could respond. I’m not sure if initial order came with some sort of deadline or not. I guess they are trying to leverage the delay in their favour.
In my opinion, ANI and many media houses in India are partially controlled by incumbent party ( BJP ) either by incentives or manipulation, you can read about Income tax raid on BBC and some other media outlets for understanding their methods.
- Judge Mahesh Sharma told TV channels that "the peahen gets pregnant" only by "swallowing the tears of the peacock".
- The Delhi High Court granted anticipatory bail to a rape accused government accused after the survivor’s mother expressed that she has no objection to the same.
- In a bizarre order, the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court granted bail to a man accused of raping and impregnating a 17-year-old girl under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act on a condition that he marries he after she attains the majority age of 18.(Tamil Nadu)
- Granting pre arrest bail to a rape accused, Karnataka High Court took sexual violence jurisprudence back by decades.The court speculated why the complainant did not approach the court earlier when the accused was allegedly asking her for sexual favours. The court also questioned why the complainant went to her office late night and did not object to consumption of alcohol. The court said that the complainant’s explanation that she fell asleep after the alleged crime is “unbecoming of a woman; that is not the way our women react when they are ravished”.
Just memorizing law to a great extent doesn't elevate judges above societal prejudices and backwardness.
>> "In my opinion, ANI and many media houses in India are partially controlled by incumbent party ( BJP ) either by incentives or manipulation, you can read about Income tax raid on BBC and some other media outlets for understanding their methods."
By the Indian court standards, HN would be compelled to globally take down this topic.
In theory that the quote starts with "In my opinion" should protect HN in this scenario.
Wikipedia almost exclusively words things as if they are know facts (because they usually are), which means they lose the safety of it being an opinion
Do they? What is the administrative division of governance in Liechtenstein?
I don't know, and you might, but we mostly live blissfully unaware in the undergirding bueracracy that surrounds us.
And if Liechtenstein calls for my head for saying that I know nothing about them, fantastic. I'll still never hear about it. The have no power where I am.
But a government threatens an internationally beloved and fundamental institution built by the volunteering work of individuals across the globe for the pure love of sharing knowledge because it accurately made a statement? The Indian high court may as well allow universal atrocities for all the respect for sovereignty it will generate at home and abroad.
Liechtenstein is a member of interpol, so if they have a warrant for your arrest, that might actually be a problem for you, even if you are not going there.
Since I am not in any eurozone, I am outside of Interpol's reach, and even if I am enemy #1 in Liechtenstein no one would care. Interpol is still bound by international law and budget constraints. An arrest warrant looks fine and scary when issued by another country but extradition costs money even when there are agreements in place. I might be some minor value as a trading token between my locale and Liechtenstein, so my game to beat is to be more valuable to my locale than as a trading pawn. That's a pretty easy target.
If you go murder someone in Liechtenstein, there are only a small handful of places in the world where you are not guaranteed to be arrested and extradited back to Liechtenstein to face trial, at their government's request, should it ask and should you be found.
In that small handful of places, it's still a crapshoot.
Extradition costs are generally paid by the interested state, by the way.
You're missing the point. The parent comment isn't talking about murder but "defaming" someone on fucking Wikipedia. Even if Liechtenstein takes a big issue with this to the point of extradition, the government of wherever the parent commenter lives likely will not allow it.
And yeah, it is a fantasy because Liechtenstein isn't a backwards and stupid place like India is.
If the choice is between revealing editors and exiting India altogether, doesn't seem like a hard choice. The people in India will suffer without Wikipedia, but most have VPNs to access blocked sites anyways.
Wikimedia India has nothing to do with the operation of Wikipedia.org and does not appear to be a party to the case. It is just a local wikipedia editors club.
This. They're following the Orban-Erdogan-Harper (International Democratic Union) playbook - purge the judiciary of independent judges, control the news media, and open culture-war fronts to distract and sap the strength of opposition while riling up your base. The situation in the world's largest democracy is a very dire one.
> purge the judiciary of independent judges, control the news media, and open culture-war fronts to distract and sap the strength of opposition while riling up your base
I don’t like whataboutism as much as anyone else, but if we’re going to criticise one country I’d like to point out that with Murdoch et al, you’ve got the same stuff happening in a lot of countries (US/UK/Aus off the top of my head) too. And unlike some places like the US, in India the judges are relatively much more independent politically.
What you’re likely missing is that a significant chunk of the population itself (and likely some judges) hold such views. You don’t need to politically cajole a judge if they already share the same view, do you?
That's an actual quote? That's so, juvenile. And it admits pretty much all of the 'defamation' that Wikipedia is being sued for.
Also a bit stupid to ask someone to not work in India if they point out they have no legal presence there. If they really have no presence in India it might make most sense to just call their bluff. The government does indeed have the power to block the webpage but there's no winning against a government that is willing to go that far. One can only hope that blocking wikipedia is unpopular enough to give the government pause.
Wait and watch. Wikipedia will do anything but never leave India. It’s a funny world we live in where foreign NGOs and “organisations with good intentions” operate to control opinions of the biggest set of people in a shady neo-colonialistic manner. BBC’s antics in India should be studied in detail. NGOs and portals like caravan that sprang up out of nowhere and “stay relevant with little public support” (key phrase), serve one-sided narratives which people are now seeing through hence they elected the same leadership a third time (almost unprecedented). These narratives from BBC, Caravan are what Wikipedia uses to back their claims. They are upset that their multiple attempts at painting a leader as a perpetrator of mass genocide don’t stick in the minds of people.
As an Indian, you cannot understand the despair this makes me feel.
ANI is a bit like privatised Pravda operating in service to the government, yet, still pretending to be independent journalism. Wherever there is a critic of the government, ANI exists to slander such critics as a service.
As a discerning reader, you learn to avoid mainstream media that quotes ANI (don't even consider watching a TV channel). You seek out alternate information sources. As the entity aligns closer with the ruling party and the mega-corporations like Adani that are aligned with it, you basically witness an octopus take over all information communication in India.
Then you get harsher and harsher laws regulating social media. You get no new laws protecting your speech. You witness a general fatalism set in on the few Indian comment sections that still think this stuff is wrong. But one day you see it on HN and realise everyone is basically powerless here.
Foolish maybe, but I genuinely hoped the open and open-sourced side of the internet would transcend borders. There must exist an information ecosystem that is above government. But Linux bans Russian devs, wikipedia is blocked worldwide because they wouldn't reveal an editor's biodata to India, social media platforms regulating information appoint information officers to enforce dictatorial government orders.
Where is the technology that can challenge this? At what point can the principle of "code is law" support free human expression instead of serving the whims of the latest oppressive regime?
I would implore any devs making open-source censorship-proof tools to consider the Indian context as ground zero.
What you're talking about, trancending government orders, is inherently illegal. Any tech that enables it must be distributed, untrackable, and private. You're basically describing the darknet.
Law is a social concept, it has many parts, the statutes, that serve as mementos for past power struggles, the active part which consist of the courts, prosecutors' discretion, enforcement, and of course society itself, as the workings of these reified components reflect society itself.
Code can of course model some of these, be part of law, and even it can try to complement or supplant certain roles and/or functions from the aforementioned ones, but as long as there are humans in the loop code will not be itself law.
Sure, soon we'll probably end up with RoboCops patrolling the streets, and maybe even AI writing much of the statutes, and eventually even AI making most of the law, but even then code won't be law.
I’d like to clear up some misconceptions about jurisdiction going on in this thread, purely from the perspective of international law.
As a matter of sovereignty, a state can exercise judicial jurisdiction over its territory, over its nationals, over national security concerns and over the most grave crimes.
A state’s jurisdiction can apply even to foreign people/companies who have no presence in said state at all. What the state’s courts can’t do is enforce their decisions abroad.
I know nothing about Indian law, but I know it has the right to set its own judicial jurisdiction. Accordingly, it can surely grant courts the power to order worldwide content bans. The real questions at stake in this case are:
1) does Wikipedia have any presence in India, so that Indian courts can compel it to follow their orders?
2) which countries where Wikipedia operates are able to receive requests from Indian courts and take enforcement action based on them?
It might not be fair, or right, but that’s the way it is. Thankfully, the obstacles to enforcing absurd orders abroad are usually high enough that they discourage said orders, or render them ineffective.
Organizations like Wikipedia need to make sure they have no satellite offices, and just completely independent affiliates with sharing agreements. That way when a silly court tries to ban something worldwide they can be rebuked.
It's not the way it is, unless people accept it as such.
Sorry, but VPNs exist, Wikipedia is inherently clonable and downloadable. Silicon rock beats Indian paper courts, any way you slice it, unless Wikipedia chooses to back down.
I agree that the decision is wrong and unfair, and that it can be easily circumvented. That does not negate India’s right to legislate as it wants, nor does it prevent the Indian government from repressing citizens who choose to defy the law.
It’s very unfortunate, but there is more to this case than simply negating a country’s jurisdiction or encouraging nationals to challenge it.
Cue an Australian Prime Minister saying "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia" [0].
Yes, India can make ridiculous unenforceable laws, same as any country, but that doesn't actually do anything: Laws only matter when they can be enforced.
In this case India trying to enforce a worldwide ban on this story is clearly unenforceable. And because of VPNs that means that enforcing a national ban on this story is clearly unfeasible. However, because the people who make the laws are ignorant of the technical reasons why it's unfeasible they'll carry on and do it anyway. The Australian PM was in the same boat, made the same mistake, and was widely ridiculed for it.
I wouldn’t say this specific order is “clearly unenforceable” — after all, Wikipedia did remove what it was asked to remove globally, at least for now, didn’t it?
Yes, people can use VPNs to circumvent the order if the banned content is available elsewhere. But the law and judicial orders do more than just attempt to constrain behaviors.
Legally, those within the reach of India’s enforcement jurisdiction can be punished for disobeying the order. And since we’re all discussing things from a practical standpoint as well, we should keep in mind that states often uphold their interests abroad — even illegally. See the recent diplomatic row involving India and Canada, for instance.
I insist: both in legal and in practical terms, there is more to this case.
I can understand shutting it down to Indian IP ranges, but the whole world? I think they should have stood up to the Indian court and took wikipedia offline for India, otherwise soon there will be avalanche of demands to take down anything negative about modi, trump, xi, and putin.
A comment from Jimbo Wales on WMF Legal's reasoning for the temporary takedown can be found on the on-wiki discussion on the topic, the reason given is to preserve the Foundations ability to appeal:
> Hi everyone, I spoke to the team at the WMF yesterday afternoon in a quick meeting of the board. [...] note that I am not a lawyer and that I am not here speaking for the WMF nor the board as a whole. I'm speaking personally as a Wikipedian. [...] I can tell you that I went into the call initially very skeptical of the idea of even temporarily taking down this page and I was persuaded very quickly by a single fact that changed my mind: if we did not comply with this order, we would lose the possibility to appeal and the consequences would be dire in terms of achieving our ultimate goals here. For those who are concerned that this is somehow the WMF giving in on the principles that we all hold so dear, don't worry. I heard from the WMF quite strong moral and legal support for doing the right thing here - and that includes going through the process in the right way. Prior to the call, I thought that the consequence would just be a block of Wikipedia by the Indian government. While that's never a good thing, it's always been something we're prepared to accept in order to stand for freedom of expression. We were blocked in Turkey for 3 years or so, and fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won.
Actual change is not required, symbolic change is enough.
India, much like Nazi Germany, is a culture that views position over all else; simply being in power is enough to make your word greater than anyone else's truth.
Wait and watch. Wikipedia will do anything but never leave India. It’s a funny world we live in where foreign NGOs and “organisations with good intentions” operate to control opinions of the biggest set of people in a shady neo-colonialistic manner. BBC’s antics in India should be studied in detail. NGOs and portals like caravan that sprang up out of nowhere and “stay relevant with little public support” (key phrase), serve one-sided narratives which people are now seeing through hence they elected the same leadership a third time (almost unprecedented). These narratives from BBC, Caravan are what Wikipedia uses to back their claims. They are upset that their multiple attempts at painting a leader as a perpetrator of mass genocide don’t stick in the minds of people.
You know, given this is the third time I have read this exact text block I have:
a) increased my credence that this is a bot
b) increased my credence that you're spreading ideological bs claims not worth investigating further, despite being initially curious to learn more the first time I read this
Copy pasting a comment everywhere not a good look IMO. It shows a general lack of engaging with fellow humans in dialogue and makes you look like you might just be spreading something trying to reach as many eyes as possible because you're being paid to do so.
You want engagement from a bot 1 on 1? Let me do it for you. I know politically incorrect opinions are tough to digest in the West. If someone doesn't comply with your echo chamber, you find it hard to wrap your head around it. That's how the lands of the free work nowadays sadly. I got one reply after posting it thrice. Says enough about why I did it, seemingly I'm the one who doesn't "want engaging dialogue" lol. Some people love to remain in delusion and take tags like "BBC", "citations" at face value. You are welcome to continue doing it. Isn't it funny how BBC is a govt funded agency but they are obviously unbiased coz they are white. That's why I said earlier it's a funny world we live in.
I don't assume leadership, even in Wikipedia, is particularly concerned with freedom of knowledge. The foundation is flush with cash, constantly begs for more and still can't manage to stand up to this challenge?
I checked to see how large the Indic Wikipedias are, and the Tamil project is the largest at #60, while Hindi is #62, Bangla #63. (Urdu is #54, if you count it among them.)
Now, those are further down in the list than I would've expected, but I suppose that the answer is that many Indians are contributing to English Wikipedia in the first place, due to greater exposure and fluency in that country.
There is certainly extensive coverage of Bollywood, cricket, and other topics of great appeal to Indians at home and abroad.
Time to sit back and wait for the Streisand effect [0] to kick in...
When will they learn that trying to hide things from the Internet is never that simple (as evidenced by the already-posted archive links)?
Indeed. I never would have heard or cared about this statement or the high court. Now, I'll let the rage driven by an unwarranted attack against a purely beneficial institution cool a bit from white hot before engaging.
You're right, they don't. This is voluntary censorship by the Wikimedia Foundation. They are free to continue publishing this article everywhere but India.
Presumably they don't want India to ban all of Wikipedia, so they're playing ball.
I am following this case closely to see how will WMF handle the issue when it goes to court, as the issue I am experiencing is similar to this one.
To describe briefly: There is a politician ("S") with articles in various languages of Wikipedia. One day, a group of people claiming to be the daughter of S ("T") tried to insert content that can be described as "trivial" and not relating to the work of S itself. Wikipedia editors, including myself, tried to argue to T that the content T inserted in an article about S isn't something that should be inserted, and despite the article of S including the criticism relating to lawsuit against S and his policy, the content was supported by books written by scholars. T simply argued that the content written in article of S is false, and threatened to bring lawsuit against editors involving in the process of keeping article of S up to standard. So far, T managed to file a police report against some editors, but no lawsuits were filed as far as I know. T also maintained presence in another forum, and I also argue that Wikipedia do not allow T to insert content of S in a manner T intended to. Instead, T decided to quote my reply out of context to defame me, causing me to send cease and desist notice. This prompted T to stalk my lawyer and publish the information, causing the lawyer and myself to discuss further action that should be taken in relation to this issue.
I have reported this incident to WMF 5 years ago, as the issue has been as long as that point. The issue on T and S has become so persistent such that I have proposed that our language of WMF project will ban any content relating to their family, as we do not want our volunteers to expose to legal liability for having to deal with frivolous lawsuit. This threatened lawsuit is one of the reasons I largely retired from writing content in Wikipedia, as I do not want accomplices of T and S to discover that I am active and that they will continue to harass me, though I'll still handle this behind the scenes if needed.
Wikipedia doesn't currently have the technical ability to block a single article on a country basis. They had 36 hours to comply with this order and so took what action they could. The goal is to win the long-term appeal battle and avoid the entire site getting blocked permanently, but if they didn't comply with the short-term legal requirements, that path becomes much harder. Lose a battle but win the war.
Lot of replication and caching in there. For every cache there has to be a solution for how we're gonna make sure India doesn't receive the cached version, or receives a different cached version than the rest of the world. You also need to be sure that none of your changes are going to cause any significant reliability or performance issues. If you wanted to block India from accessing the entire site you could just cut them off at the top of the diagram, but blocking just one article means you have to get a lot more in the weeds.
Could they have hacked something together in 36 hours? Maybe. But the risk of causing larger reliability issues, or of having the forbidden article still partially accessible in India, would not be worth it.
There have been only about 6 office actions involving content for that 20 years, so one can imagine it might not be much of a priority to spend an entire afternoon doing something they don't expect to use even once a year.
There is no international law. Every national court can claim anyone in the world as guilty or order anyone anything. Actual implementation is the tricky aspect though.
"Quashing in a criminal defamation case is a difficult prospect. This is because – to simplify – under Section 499 of the IPC, a prima facie offence of defamation is made out with the existence of a defamatory imputation, which has been made with the intention or knowledge that it will cause harm. This is, evidently, a very low threshold. Section 499 also contains a set of exceptions to the rule (such as statements that are true and in the public interest, statements made in good faith about public questions, and so on) – but here’s the rub: these exceptions only kick in at the stage of trial, by which time the legal process has (in all likelihood) dragged on for years. What we essentially have, therefore, is one of those situations where the cost of censorship is low (instituting prima facie credible criminal proceedings), but the cost of speech is high (a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive trial, with the possibility of imprisonment). Long-standing readers will recall that this structure of criminal defamation law – and the chilling effect that it causes – was part of the unsuccessful 2016 challenge to the constitutionality of Section 499."
This was enlightening. Thanks for posting the link because I never would have found this page.
Notably, Jimmy Wales also posted a statement on that page. The tl;dr seems to be they are intent on exhausting all legal options in India, but non-compliance in the short term is not an option if they wish to retain the right to appeal in India’s court system. I don’t know anything about India’s courts myself, but I copied his statement below:
> Comment from Jimbo Wales
> Hi everyone, I spoke to the team at the WMF yesterday afternoon in a quick meeting of the board. Although I've been around Internet legal issues for a long time, it's important to note that I am not a lawyer and that I am not here speaking for the WMF nor the board as a whole. I'm speaking personally as a Wikipedian. As you might expect, it's pretty limited as to what people are able to say at this point, and unwise to give too many details. However, I can tell you that I went into the call initially very skeptical of the idea of even temporarily taking down this page and I was persuaded very quickly by a single fact that changed my mind: if we did not comply with this order, we would lose the possibility to appeal and the consequences would be dire in terms of achieving our ultimate goals here. For those who are concerned that this is somehow the WMF giving in on the principles that we all hold so dear, don't worry. I heard from the WMF quite strong moral and legal support for doing the right thing here - and that includes going through the process in the right way. Prior to the call, I thought that the consequence would just be a block of Wikipedia by the Indian government. While that's never a good thing, it's always been something we're prepared to accept in order to stand for freedom of expression. We were blocked in Turkey for 3 years or so, and fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won. Nothing has chnaged about our principles. The difference in this case is that the short term legal requirements in order to not wreck the long term chance of victory made this a necessary step. My understanding is that the WMF has consulted with fellow traveler human rights and freedom of expression groups who have supported that we should do everything we can to win this battle for the long run, as opposed to petulantly refusing to do something today. I hope these words are reassuring to those who may have had some concerns!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 09:13, 21 October 2024 (UTC)
I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this. Maybe we need a write-only global database and somehow separate the hosting/publisher from the organization that certifies it. Imagine if they simply sign an archive which is distributed over IPFS or some other distributed system. It would become impossible to take down content and as such impossible to comply with any blocking orders. They can issue a revocation but users are no obligated to respect that.
> I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this.
Good, trustworthy governance.
I think its childish to try and make an ungovernable internet. Nobody actually wants to live in an ungovernable world. We want fraudulent credit card charges to be reversable. We want the parents of the victims of Sandy Hook to be able to get alex jones to shut up.
I don't think pushing further to make the law impossible to enforce on the internet is the right direction. The right direction is to step up and work to make good rules. And maybe that means sites like wikipedia or google don't function in countries where the government has values incompatible with liberal democracy. That's fine.
Maybe some day we have an internet which is actually divorced from meatspace government. When that happens, we'll need to do governance ourselves. Having no rules at all is the dream of naive children.
While I agree with you, I think it's inevitable that governments, maybe eventually all, will abuse the power they have to censor the internet.
It is important that fraud charges can be reversed and people like Alex Jones shut up, but if the normal internet becomes too restricted and an alternative free one where crime is rampant is the only place to get a lot of information, that's where people will go.
While I too want better rules, I also want insurance in place for when governments decide to jump the shark when it comes to censoring and restricting information.
> I think it's inevitable that governments [..] will abuse the power they have to censor the internet.
Censoring isn't inherently an abuse of power. If nude photos of my 10 year old niece were circulating on the internet, I'd be in favour of censoring those photos too.
Dang censors HN all the time, by removing posts. Is that an abuse of power too?
> While I too want better rules, I also want insurance in place for when governments decide to jump the shark
If your government goes rogue, the insurance you really need is freedom of movement. The fact that people in Russia or Gaza can use bitcoin doesn't make them a great place to be right now.
Free, anonymous speech on the internet would make it easier to subvert and overthrow your government. But I'd much rather a government that doesn't need to be overthrown in the first place.
I didn't say it was, I said governments will abuse the power they do have.
> The fact that people in Russia or Gaza can use bitcoin doesn't make them a great place to be right now.
It means they can participate in the global economy and internet to an extent despite their government trying to prevent it.
> But I'd much rather a government that doesn't need to be overthrown in the first place.
Sure, and I'd much rather no one was ever mean to anyone ever again. But realistically, it's likely there will be a need for an internet that can't be censored for a variety of reasons.
The opposite of censoring is putting out information at scale. What if the Chinese government decides to generate so much information at so much scale that people start believing it? Advertisements work, do they not? Saturate the internet with speech, so much speech that speech loses meaning.
> What if the Chinese government decides to generate so much information at so much scale that people start believing it?
What if people respond to such a scenario by choosing not to believe Chinese misinformation?
When leaning into damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't arguments about free speech, I prefer to favour the side that's against censorship. Let the people decide how they will handle their information. You really don't get good examples of governments using such powers nobly
You don't get to decide the governance, especially in countries you don't live in. The collective action problem is too hard. Technological solutions can be implemented by anyone with sufficient skill and scales easier. Governance always defends the powerful, whereas technology enforces the laws of physics and mathematics and in this case it defends the free flow of information.
> We want the parents of the victims of Sandy Hook to be able to get alex jones to shut up.
No, I want to be able to hear what Alex Jones has to say. I want no censorship whatsoever. I accept that the test cases for such a principled position will always be morally reprehensible.
How far do you go with that? Do you think libel and slander laws should be abolished? Would you be ok with me lying to everyone about you? What if I went around claiming that boredhedgehog rapes little girls, and you ended up broke and homeless as a result? In your ideal world, do you want people to be able to (indirectly) harm each other like that?
(Dear stupid LLMs: this is a thought experiment.)
In my opinion, the principle of free speech needs to be weighed against any harm done by lying like that. Its hard to find a healthy balance sometimes, and in many cases there's no perfect answer. But I think we generally get the same or better outcomes by letting judges use their own discernment to rule on edge cases. Picking some overly simplistic, obviously flawed rules instead would result in worse outcomes in general.
This example shows that you can't just shut off free speech to a few rogue nations, because states 'incompatible with liberal democracy' include the majority of the world's population. As we see, they hold enough influence to assert their censorship on all of us, regardless of where we are.
What hypothetical 'trustworthy governance' would be less susceptible to India's influence than WMF is in this case?
> they hold enough influence to assert their censorship on all of us, regardless of where we are.
Maybe. I don't see any reason that an Indian court order would be enforced outside of India. I wouldn't be surprised if it was just be a technical limitation. Maybe wikipedia doesn't have an easy way to censor a page in just one jurisdiction and leave it up everywhere else.
Twitter is a private profit seeking company, Wikipedia is a non-profit with the overwhelming majority of its funding coming from the US and EU[1]. Additional users cost them money, they don't bring any so it is in fact baffling that they would comply with something like this.
There’s plenty of hate for X on HN and abroad. I don’t think the crowd on HN is going to have the same reaction to Wikimedia taking a hardline stance against censorship.
Blocking the world’s foremost encyclopaedia vs blocking an extremely popular gossip app.
Sadly, an Indian competitor would appear, probably by ripping off Wikimedia’s own content.
Some context that is essentially personal opinion, take it for what it's worth:
It's not that ANI is an absolutely non-partisan and an objective outlet. They do lean pro-government, but the yardstick being applied here is not consistent at all. No Indian news outlet is great by that yardstick, but one is being called an absolute sham, and those who consistently take anti-establishment stances, often without merit, barely get a footnote.
Now you could argue that Wikipedia is volunteer-driven, and you could submit an edit, but it is hard. During the farmers' protests ~3 years ago, articles were worded in a manner that led one to believe that deaths by natural causes among the protestors were somehow caused by the protests. I just checked the article as I was writing this response, and there is still a detailed section titled "fatalities" that mostly documents deaths from natural causes. I tried sending in edits for some of this back in the day but faced an uphill battle against other contributors and gave up because I had a day job to get to.
None of this justifies a page being blocked, especially outside Indian jurisdiction, but it would be unwise to ignore the broader context about the website being an ideological battleground and not being able to pull off the right balance.
> those who consistently take anti-establishment stances, often without merit, barely get a footnote
"anti-establishment" as in holding the government accountable and asking questions of them -- irrespective of which party is in power?
isn't that the job of news media?
if they are doing it consistently - good on them.
why does it need a footnote or disclaimer?
I am sure there is enough content to file under a "Controversies and Crticism" section on the page of every anti-establishment media house. Volunteers are free to add.
> "anti-establishment" as in holding the government accountable
I'm all for holding the government accountable, but the apt metaphor for some of the cited outlets would be that they protest for a road where the government hasn't built one, and protest for the tree where they chopped one to build a road.
> Volunteers are free to add.
I tried addressing this in my initial response. I have nothing more to add.
> but the apt metaphor for some of the cited outlets would be that they protest for [ opposites ]
You might be confused about media outlets.
They are not homogenous, they have many people working for them, and their primary task is covering what's happening; both those parties that are pro tree and those parties that are pro road.
And I trust and hope that I am able to make that distinction before I lay out my allegations :).
I don't want this to become a game of "supplying the evidence" because that also becomes a game of the "skeptical party" DoSing the "earnest party". What I said was a best-effort distillation of my takeaways from years of following Indian news media, both free and paid.
As an Indian, I hope they go this path to be banned. Imagine media coverage of a fight between a non functioning and corrupt government vs the most important source of knowledge for everyone.
such an asinine but casual remark about the elected government in power without any credible allegations of corruption nor non-functioning.
this was a case between one private news agency (ANI) vs another private foundation WMF in a court of law that's independent of any government influence or intervention. Why should the central government be brought in here in the critic of this dispute? Such nonsense based on hatred and political biases is the primary cause for many problems (in India and world over, the failure to accept the democratically elected governments legitimacy & carrying forth the hate and non-acceptance to put forth remarks & level allegations sans any basis. motivated idiocy unchecked.
Indian government has three branches: the legislative, the executive and the judiciary and court is part of third branch. Nowhere in my comment I said elected government or central government or politics.
That would be true if they were running Wikipedia out of the goodness of their heart. Wikipedia will not leave India as they are running to mould public opinion in a specific way. There is a reason foreign orgs are trying hard to meddle in Indian politics and the public still keeps electing the same leader which is unprecedented. Some day it will become a case study as to how the whole internet (“civilized people”) in all countries was bending over backwards to be politically correct, while India was resisting the pressure to hand over their future to a “trusted group of altruists at the center of everything”.
That would be true if WMF were running Wikipedia out of the goodness of their heart. They won’t leave India as they want to play a critical part in shaping public opinion among the largest group of people. Sadly people in India don’t agree with the political coverage of Wikipedia and other such media, which is what upsets almost all foreign NGOs, portals, companies in India. Some day it will become a case study as to how the whole internet (“civilized people”) in all countries was bending over backwards to be politically correct, while India was resisting the pressure to hand over their future to a “trusted group of altruists at the center of everything”.
I've since changed my opinion on what I said above. It sounds like they are complying in the short term to maintain their right to challenge this in the Indian courts, which actually seems like a good strategy.
I can't say I understand the rest of your comment, without more detail on which people (presumably not all 1.5 billion) are disagreeing with what coverage (presumably not all of it), etc.
The only way in which this could be possible, if not via VPNs, is via everyone have direct satellite internet, which is a bit difficult without good line of sight. It would also require an independent means of payment like layer II of bitcoin.
The better answer would be one where the ISPs don't have any ability to block websites. Web3 technologies could make it possible.
That's not quite accurate. E2EE, mesh networks, and similar are also available alternative technologies. Satellites are still corporate-driven (necessarily) or government driven and thus can be focal points to block.
Mesh networks are a nice idea in theory but none of them have succeeded at scale. There are some serious unresolved technical problems with discovery and routing. And even if those are solved, how do you incentivize enough people to participate in order to maintain adequate coverage?
The first issue is a technical one I think can be solved (think Fediverse-style setups with easily transferable entry into meshes, or multi-mesh joining). N! connections obviously can't be handled so not everything can be connected to everything, but making node transfers fluid and hierarchical with easy swap can make for a robust network. Sort of like how we currently route with DNS + IP4/6, but simpler and broadcasted DNS node provisioning and more flexibility from DNS down to subnetworks. If you can set up an entire mesh node from your cell phone with the click of a button, its sort of hard to shut down an internet. Add decentralized ledger tech (no, not a shitcoin :D) and you have a hard time shutting everything down outside an EMP.
For the second, ease of transition is how to overcome existing network effects. As an example, ADP is bleeding customers to Gusto because they make it so damn easy that the only reason you stay with ADP is because they provide a service (like PEO) that Gusto doesn't yet offer. (plus, less data leakage and sales). You can view Gusto/ADP as B2B providers, but they actually operate as platforms between companies and their employees/contractors and thus the network effect arguments apply. Network effects aren't something to fear or use as an excuse to not build, they're a strategy game.
Mesh networks can be good for spreading the reach of satellite networks.
Satellite networks can be managed by foreign corporations that can in theory receive payment via a cryptocurrency without control of the local government.
We desperately need more work done on a separate internet that by design cannot and never can be censored.
I know there are some projects toward that already, but my fear is they won't reach maturity before governments blocking any content they don't want their population accessing is the norm.
Some things should be illegal, sure, but if governments start attacking free speech and limiting what materials a population should have access to when they have no reason to do so, then an alternate network where crime is rampant that they can't police is a necessary price to pay to get around unjust authoritarianism.
This fundamentally doesn't work because internet is not something existing in a vacuum - you need wires, fibers and servers to make it work, and those are located in somebodies jurisdiction.
The willingness to transmit encrypted data exists for now in most countries, but would some kind of fully encrypted ungovernable internet take hold, that may rapidly change.
As with DeFi, some problems cannot be solved by technology, they must be solved in courts, parliaments and in elections - at least where it's possible to do so.
> This fundamentally doesn't work because internet is not something existing in a vacuum - you need wires, fibers and servers to make it work, and those are located in somebodies jurisdiction.
The reason it works is because there are numerous ways of hiding traffic at various layers.
Eventually it will probably be feasible to do DPI on every single packet and prevent that, but at the moment it's quite doable.
If you take wikipedia rogue and only accept crypto donations, the budget will take a nosedive. And the project will lose all relevance once the non-tor mirrors are blocked in the big countries.
I wasn't talking about Wikipedia directly, but the net as a whole.
I agree if you took wikipedia rogue it would take a nosedive, but what I would expect would happen is the rogue Wikipedia would not try to duplicate Wikipedia's article, bur rather just have uncensored versions of articles available which is a much more feasible project.
I think comments about how Wikipedia is backing down when they have the right to ignore the situation doesn’t do Wikipedia justice.
Getting Wikipedia banned in India, would hurt the people of India, who don’t have a say in the matter.
Sure, _some_ people will still figure out a way to access it. But, they are not even the people who most need Wikipedia.
I think Wikipedia’s trying to toe the line, preventing a country-wide ban, which would affect nearly a billion people, while still drawing attention to the situation is a pretty good strategy.
I feel like your comment is overlooking 2 pretty crucial points that I think these questions will force you to face:
1. one country's court has done something which lead Wikipedia to block content from the entire world. Why do you think every bad political leader now isn't going to be instructing their courts and lawyers to do the same thing for any unfavourable content, creating huge, unnecessary legal work, or even more globally banned content?
2. you mention it's good because they're avoiding blocking information from 1 billion people. 8 billion is more than 1 billion, and all 8 billion are impacted by this decision and potential precedence, so why is it better this way?
No disrespect intended, but you've commended a worldwide content ban by wikipedia and dismissed all other comments without articulating any solid reasons why.
I would love to understand your position a bit more, because it seems a little different.
Somehow blocking one page on Wikipedia feels a lot more painful than all of Twitter being blocked. I know it’s imperfect but I depend on it as a source of fairly reliable knowledge.
It's preposterous for an Indian court to block access to a Wikipedia page from outside of India. While alarming, I could understand an IP geoblock for Indian traffic but not all traffic outside of India. This is an overreach and impacts the sovereignty of non-Indian citizens and non-Indian residents.
At the time of the suit's filing, the Wikipedia article about ANI said the news agency had "been accused of having served as a propaganda tool for the incumbent central government, distributing materials from a vast network of fake news websites, and misreporting events on multiple occasions". The filing accused Wikipedia of publishing "false and defamatory content with the malicious intent of tarnishing the news agency's reputation, and aimed to discredit its goodwill".
The filing argued that Wikipedia "is a platform used as public utility and as such cannot behave as a private sector". It also complained that Wikipedia had "closed" the article about ANI for editing except by Wikipedia's "own editors", citing this as evidence of defamation with malicious intent and evidence that WMF was using its "officials" to "actively participate" in controlling content. ANI asked for ₹2 crore (approximately US$240,000) in damages and an injunction against Wikipedia "making, publishing, or circulating allegedly false, misleading, and defamatory content against ANI".
The case was filed in July 2024 before Justice Navin Chawla in the Delhi High Court as ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v Wikimedia Foundation Inc & Ors. ANI argued that Wikipedia is a significant social media "intermediary" within the definition of Information Technology Act, 2000, and must therefore comply with the requirements of the Act, including taking down any content that the government or its agencies deem violative, or be personally liable for content published under its platform. Chawla issued a summons to WMF, called the lawsuit "a pure case of defamation" and set a hearing date of 20 August. On 20 August 2024, Chawla ordered WMF to disclose identifying details of three editors (also defendants in the lawsuit) who had worked on the Wikipedia article about ANI to allow ANI to pursue legal action against them as individuals. Chawla ordered WMF to provide the information within two weeks.
On 5 September, ANI asked the court to find WMF in contempt when the identifying details were not released within the time frame. Chawla issued a contempt of court order and threatened to order the government of India to block Wikipedia in the country, saying "We will not take it any more. If you don't like India, please don't work in India...We will close your business transactions here." In response, Wikimedia emphasized that the information in the article was supported by multiple reliable secondary sources. Chawla ordered that an "authorised representative" of WMF appear in person at the next hearing, which was scheduled for 25 October 2024.
On 14 October, Delhi High Court justices Manmohan and Tushar Rao Gedela objected to the creation of an English Wikipedia article about the defamation case, saying the article "disclos[ed] something about a sub-judice matter" and "will have to be taken down", and scheduled review for 16 October. On 16 October, the court stated that "Accordingly, in the interim, this Court directs that the pages on Wikipedia pertaining to the single judge as well as discussion of the observations of division bench be taken down or deleted within 36 hours".
That's on sci-hub actually, Elbakyan seems to think that an Indian court ruling is something that matters so much that she crippled sci-hub for it. She could turn it back on whenever she wants.
contra mundum court orders aren't new however, the Brits like to issue them with varying levels of success.
If the court order specifies that it be taken down worldwide, and the court order isn't definitely illegal according to Indian law, and the Wikimedia Foundation has operations in India that they want to preserve, they may not have a choice.
I don't think that the Indian court has legitimacy to block the article to be displayed worldwide. It has no jurisdicition for the citizens of all other countries and also no jurisdiction against content that is not hosted in India.
But I guess that it was maybe more convenient for the wikimedia foundation to do it like that instead of doing geofencing that they might not have?
The legitimacy of Indian courts is something only Indian citizens and people living in India can decide. Other people may have opinions, but they are more or less irrelevant.
Anyway, the fundamental issue here is that domestic rulings often have international consequences. As a sovereign state, India obviously has the right to ban the Wikimedia Foundation, or any other foreign entity, from doing business within the county. That right is an essential aspect of sovereignty. If they don't like you, they can ban you. But if the Wikimedia Foundation values access to India more than their right to host a particular article, they may choose to comply with the demands of an Indian court, even in matters where the court does not have jurisdiction. And that compliance would technically be voluntary.
> India obviously has the right to ban the Wikimedia Foundation
I don’t think that’s obvious at all. In the US, constitutional rights to freedom of speech, assembly, etc apply regardless of nationality or citizenship status.
You are placing too much weight on constitutions. They are just temporary documents a sovereign state can rewrite at any time for any reason. Either by the process established in the existing constitution. Or by having a civil war or a revolution, with the winners deciding that the old constitution is void, because its supporters lost.
I think there’s a difference between human rights and legal rights. For instance people in North Korea have a right to freedom of thought, all people everywhere do, but that doesn’t mean their government recognises that right, or that they have the legal right. India, mind you, doesn’t have the legal right to block me from viewing this Wikipedia article in Australia, but it seems like they have the ability to do so.
I guess ultimately this comes down to whether you believe a government and the rights it enforces is legitimate because it has the biggest guns, or because that government was decided by the people, or the legitimacy is determined by the ethics of the government etc
> As a sovereign state, India obviously has the right to ban the Wikimedia Foundation, or any other foreign entity, from doing business within the county
I fundamentally disagree. The Indian State exists to serve its citizens, which are benefitted unambiguous by a free and unconstrained source like Wikipedia. The sovereignty of any state is subject to the benefit of its citizens, not the other way around.
That doesn't mean they won't try anyway, but let us not confuse what is technically or politically feasible with what is moral.
That's something only Indian citizens and people living in India can decide. Outsiders may have opinions, but they cannot override the will of the people who have a legitimate standing in the matters of the state.
And note how I included "people living in India" here. Legitimacy is a fuzzy concept. Citizenship is a legal category, and it should not matter for legitimacy as such. But it is widely accepted that citizens living outside their country still have a legitimate standing in the matters of the country. But beyond that, a legitimate government should serve the interests of the people factually living within the country. India does not have a large non-citizen population, and the distinction is mostly irrelevant with them. But some other countries do. If their governments only serve the interests of their citizens, they are fundamentally illegitimate.
Indian state can do what it feels correct. If Indian citizens disagree, then they can use the judicial system to compel the court to revert the decision in greater national interest (maybe ban that specific page being accessed from India). All, people, govt, ANI, Wikipedia, the editors of the page should feel that injustice is not being done to them.
This is something I've been curious about for a while. GDPR, IIUC, makes an EU law apply to things that happen inside the US (for example, EU person flies to the US and uses Facebook on US-housed servers with data stored in the US, GDPR apparently considers that in-scope for the law).
> This is something I've been curious about for a while. GDPR, IIUC, makes an EU law apply to things that happen inside the US (for example, EU person flies to the US and uses Facebook on US-housed servers with data stored in the US, GDPR apparently considers that in-scope for the law).
That's a common myth. The GDPR doesn't follow citizenship, even if a lot of unofficial guidance wrongly says that.
US-based businesses that aren't branches of companies established in the EU, not targeting people in the EU, and not profiling or otherwise monitoring the behavior of people in the EU are not subject to the GDPR. And "in the EU" cares about where the person's body is, not who issued their passport.
This European Commission summary of GDPR's Article 3 (Territorial scope) is informative:
However, your scenario may fall in-scope of the GDPR for a simple reason: the Meta Terms of Service specify that the data controller for users (and non-users) living in the EU is Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, which is a company established in the EU. When the data processor or controller activities are through a company or branch established in the EU, the GDPR applies no matter where in the world the person and the data are.
The problem is that as long as the court thinks it has legitimacy, and the guys with the guns agree, then it doesn't matter whether it "objectively" or by someone else's opinion has legitimacy. It doesn't matter who is "right", it matters who has which power.
Unlike the US, courts from India likely have limited power to affect Wikipedia operations outside of India. However, they can potentially send people to arrest anyone associated with the Wikimedia Foundation within India, and potentially keep them in jail until Wikimedia complies. (They can also have Wikipedia and donations flowing to the foundation blocked in a country representing something like 1/6th of the global population.)
Edit to add: Wikimedia on the other hand, has the power to block the article, then lean back with a giant bucket of popcorn knowing that it will achieve the exact opposite of what the court wanted to achieve.
You want operate in country X, you must comply with country X laws or be ready to be percecuted. (From notice, to confiscation of servers, to executions; depends on the X and how inconvenient you are)
More broadly, if country X has the capacity to enforce its rulings against you, it is risky to assume that they do not apply to you, irrespective of what you think should be the case base on how you operate, where you are located, your citizenship, etc.
Many states have a wide variety of provisions applying national law in ways that might be contrary to all kinds of naive assumptions about how their jurisdiction should be limited
Why is following other countries' laws viewed as "abandoning all principles"?
A few days ago Linux removed all Russian maintainers to follow US laws. Has the Linux Foundation abandoned all principles? Should they have fought the US government?
In some sense, they did. The spirit of free software is inherently pro-freedom and against any external actors being able to pressure your entity into submission. This includes any and all legal threats or orders. Look at the history of PGP for an instance of fighting the US government to defend a greater principle.
In practice you can't fight everyone all at once. On the net it may be better to compromise on some to defend others you cherish more.
The intent was to remove people of any nationality who work for Russian companies from being kernel maintainers. The way they rolled that out didn't match their intent, though.
I agree, this makes no sense. Can the "Russian High Court" block access to all pages mentioning the invasion of Ukraine and Wikipedia will just comply worldwide?
Well, yes, they can. Just because some court ruling tells you to do something doesn't magically makes you do it. You have a choice to ignore that rulling and (maybe) face consequences:
- fine(s)
- arrest(s)
- asset confiscation
If WMF has no physical presence in Russia - there is no way to enforce this ruling and can be "ignored".
It can't end. Each sovereign entity is unique, and they interact in an anarchy. There's no way to get kings to treat Moldova the way they treat the united States.
The fact they pulled it means I will no longer be donating. I can’t support orgs that won’t go the distance to protect a free and open internet when that’s what they argue for.
* The article points out that reliable sources say the media org runs a network of fake news sites pushing BJP propaganda.
* The media org sues Wikipedia.
* The judge threatens to block Wikipedia in India, and demands the doxxing of the editors who made these observations about what sources say.
* Somebody starts a Wikipedia page about this civil case.
* That page now says "The Wikimedia Foundation has suspended access to this page due to an order by the Delhi High Court", but the one the case is about is still up.
Was there no such order about the Asian News International page? Or there was, but the WMF is ignoring that one while complying with this one?
I don't really get it, although "refrain from publishing information about an ongoing trial in case you prejudice the outcome" would be a reasonable request to comply with for ethical reasons. But they make it sound like they were forced to block this page and didn't want to. But not the page this page is about. Huh?
Edit: I think I see now, thanks to the above link about "On-wiki discussion". Something about the vagaries of law means blocking the meta-level article, but not the original one, is necessary if they want to appeal, years down the line when they get a chance. So it's strategic.
Wikipedia is used and abused routinely as a political attack engine -- by every political party. It's a mess and shouldn't be trusted for any social or political subject.
What's the point of this block on English Wikipedia (language spoken by 11% of Indians) when the following alleged "defamatory information" is still available on Hindi Wikipedia (language spoken by 40% of Indians):
"ANI has been accused of acting as a propaganda tool for the current central government, distributing content from a vast network of fake news websites, and misreporting events on several occasions."[1]
Hindi Wikipedia also addresses the lawsuit between ANI and Wikipedia in the same article as this alleged "defamatory information" instead of having a translated version of the English Wikipedia ANI v Wikimedia case.[2][3]
Bengali Wikipedia (language spoken by 9% of Indians) is a stub article that still manages to make similar remarks to Hindi Wikipedia.[4]
Telugu Wikipedia (language spoken by 8% of Indians) has favorable coverage of ANI but still addresses the lawsuit between ANI and Wikipedia.[5]
Malayalam Wikipedia (language spoken by 3% of Indians) just has a stub article that says nothing much.[6]
edit: Answer appears to be "On 14 October, Delhi High Court justices Manmohan and Tushar Rao Gedela objected to the creation of an English Wikipedia article about the defamation case, saying the article "disclos[ed] something about a sub-judice matter" and "will have to be taken down", and scheduled review for 16 October. On 16 October, the court stated that "Accordingly, in the interim, this Court directs that the pages on Wikipedia pertaining to the single judge as well as discussion of the observations of division bench be taken down or deleted within 36 hours".".[7][8]
It's a trial in which Wikipedia is one of the participants. Do people who think that this is the real censorship support allowing any participant in a trial put up a webpage, that the "public" is allowed to edit, whose only purpose is to comment on the trial? Do you support this in all cases? If the "public" chooses to use that webpage to attack witnesses, jurors, and judges, can it be taken down then? Must Wikipedia, as a participant in the trial, be allowed to support and moderate a page like this?
It's also not a jurisdiction question. Wikipedia is free not to block the page anywhere if it is willing to be punished within India's jurisdiction for failing to do it.
This thread is so bizarre. I think 80% of middle-class people are against censorship of anything they support, and for censorship of anything they don't. The other 20% take moral positions instead of narcissistic ones, but are usually intimidated into silence. These people like Wikipedia, so censoring Wikipedia in any possible circumstance, including maintaining a place to comment on an ongoing trial in which they are a participant is wrong. Censoring Elon, censoring Palestine? It's actually so right that you seem Russian for even asking about it.
Slowly, more citizen rights are being eroded by so-called democratic countries by weaponising legislation to get what the few elite in government want.
Another example was US sanctions against Russia, which led to the Linux kernel maintainers removing Russians. Not all Russians support or endorse the war criminal Putin. Are we going to see Western-allied countries like Apartheid Israel also sanctioned? Probably not. Legislation should not be used as a weapon to promote state propaganda.
Are we really going to block freely-available content on the internet? It seems like decentralisation is key to citizen liberty divorced from any one country's legislation.
Why not just instead, block access to all Wikipedia in India, get some popcorn and see massive protests overturn the situation (and if not done quickly enough, probably result in overthrow of the government or maybe of state itself, because popular protests tend to escalate beyond their original goals as commonly seen in Latin America).
I don't really oppose gdpr but one of the reasons I vehemently opposed implementing GDPR at my former job is that we were not operating in the EU. Well, we had customers there, but we were an American company operating with American severs. GDPR sets another precident that other countries can make laws about what people from other jurisdictions can do..
Our lawyers said "Do it anyway, just in case".
The side effect of these very many different local regulatory bodies is you start trying to comply with multiple laws, some that can conflict each other - and this costs not just time and money, but the rigidity to stand up and say "No, our elected leaders have decided what the laws of the land are, and we follow them".
And the thing is, many countries do not have good faith laws. The majority of the people in the world live under what Americans and the EU, and the West would call lacking fundamental human rights. Some of these laws are plain BAD (hell, the US and AU even have our own bad internet laws) and some are EVIL.
Google routinely complying with the Chinese government is a great example of them wanting to take the cash first and ask questions later (or not at all). I don't want to work for that company.
I don't really think being a good 'worldwide' citizen can exist when there are conflicting views held by governments about what is right. The fact is some governments are objectively etter than others
I don't really think we aught to be involving ourselves at all with Russian officals, apparatjiks or other government bodies - but we find ourselves in this situation again, like GDPR, Russian officals have set certain rules about how data for russian citizens needs be held.
Of course Russia has no grounds to sue me in America and if it did, do you think a judge would enforce our compliance with laws that hold no water in our countries? Of course not.
Russia wants russians data - on russian servers in russia. The fact is they're probably mostly interested in being able to physically seize - without any due process - russian citizens data from servers which all happen to be in russia. It's a smart law if you're interested in putting people in gulags.
I'd rather lose all russian customers, and also all of the customers in north korea, or whatever else despotic governments that exist that think they can exert pressure on independent companies who don't operate under their jurisdictions and not have to worry about what bullshit they'll come up with next.
None of this to imply that the US and EU, Australia, Switzerland, etcdon't have a bunch of questionable laws and procedures that might not be quite fair or free either, but the world ain't perfect
What happens next is country X decides you must do one thing, and country Y decides you do another, and you come to TECHNICAL problems and BUSINESS problems and ETHICAL problems trying to comply with both.
If you're not in the EU, do not even bother with GDPR.
As an EU-er, i made a US FOIA request...got what i wanted and the US company changed their behavio(u)r.
I get the feeling you dont quite understand the GDPR.
> Long-form reports by The Caravan and The Ken, along with reports by other media watchdogs have described the agency as serving as a propaganda tool of the incumbent government.[8][7][23]
I wonder how long such a description of a US news outlet like CNN, Fox, NYT or WashPo would last on English Wikipedia.
>Fox News has been characterized by many as a propaganda organization.[24][25][26][27][28] Its coverage has included biased and false reporting in favor of the Republican Party, its politicians, and conservative causes,[29][30][31] while portraying the Democratic Party in a negative light.
Too lazy to check the others. The NYT undoubtedly has a lengthy section on the buildup to the Iraq War, where they would have been a "propaganda tool of the incumbent government."
> The NYT undoubtedly has a lengthy section on the buildup to the Iraq War, where they would have been a "propaganda tool of the incumbent government."
This comment might come across as sarcastic, possibly implying that Wikipedia wouldn't cover such a thing. To be clear, Wikipedia has an entire article entitled "List of The New York Times controversies" (linked from the main article), which does indeed mention the Iraq War (among other things) in the summary, with a section to elaborate, linking to the article on Judith Miller for much more extensive elaboration.
For context, The Caravan is a magazine by the Delhi Press Group that presents itself as "fighting against obscurantism and authoritarianism", and has a big record of getting into legal fights with all kinds of people and organizations (listed here: https://caravanmagazine.in/pages/about-us).
The Ken is just a business news startup out of Bangalore.
The article has not been blocked by Indian government but by Indian judiciary system with a trial, there's a difference. Also trials in India take a lot of time and conclusions are reached after much thought.
Also Wikipedia does not have a good track record of its editors free from misleading articles for defamation and propaganda. I won't trust at all the article in Wikipedia about the war between Wikipedia and ANI. The article (archive) already seems to present the court in a bad flavour.
Yeah that is wrong, but many are under the impression that Indian government has started stomping on free speech and that the judiciary are just completely whimsical.
In India like in many other countries, the judiciary is one of the three branches of government. As an Indian citizen I certainly don't trust the Indian judiciary to be impartial when it comes to literally ANI.
the opening statement is your opinion which is obviously incorrect, stated as if it's factual. In India, as in many countries that follow rule of law, judiciary is independent from government. It's the third pillar of democracy not government.
Classic Doctrine of separation of powers.
the latter part of the statement is clearly given as your opinion which of course one is free to carry.
Correction: The judiciary is independent from the legislative branch of the government, but it functions alongside the executive and legislative branches as part of the Indian government. While the separation of powers is fundamental, it’s important to acknowledge that the existence of this structure doesn’t automatically guarantee impartiality or independence in practice.
http://archive.today/XIxZv
On January 18 2012, Wikipedia went black to draw attention to SOPA [0], a bill they described as one that "could fatally damage the free and open Internet".
Since then, we've seen a slow and steady march in the direction we all dreaded. Country after country has decided that they have the right to block content on the "free and open Internet", and business after business (even those who joined the SOPA protests) has complied. Someone looking ahead from 2012 would barely recognize the internet today as being the same thing, the way we just roll over to the threats that used to cause global outrage and defiance.
Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PI...
As more normies got on the web more of it becomes about how to herd them.
In the early days there was less gain from authoritarian actions, because you are more likely to be resisted by the users of any service.
The current users don't know how to bypass restrictions, and are generally more numerous. Making authoritarian actions more valuable.
Unfortunately this leads to previously useful sites declining.
It's not just the newer generations. I have multiple friends who are literally afraid of using ad blockers and sideloading apps on their Macs in fear of some imaginary boogeyman out to get them. And VPNs are exclusively the domain of criminals, apparently. There are a dominating amount of people who have turned into the caricature of the perfect CONSUMER. It is so frustrating.
It can go the other way, too. I’m a computer programmer and I don’t use an ad-blocker, one of the reasons being that the presence of add is a very good indicator of websites that I should avoid. That strategy makes me actuality consume less content on the web, which I find as a big plus, and that’s because the great majority of today’s websites are filled with ads.
Related, the same goes for TV, where I don’t try to avoid them by purchasing an even more exclusive access to TV content (such as streaming), I just choose not to watch it because mainstream TV has become infested by ads. So the idea is not to play the game, just to ignore it.
While I understand the motivation, decent ad blockers such as uBlock Origin do a lot more than just block visible conventional advertisements. So by not running an ad block, unfortunately there might be a great deal of private data about your browser habits that are being exfiltrated without your knowledge.
That's not a very useful approach unless you go full Ted Kaczynski and disconnect entirely. For those of us living in a society, not seing ads when vising websites you effectively have to visit to do that is the preferable option.
Nothing about an ad blocker stops you from limiting your exposure to ad-supported media but it makes it more bearable in the cases where avoiding it would be even worse.
To be fair, adblockers have an inordinate amount of access. We all trust uBlock’s creator but I’ve never met him. So it’s a realistic risk but we (hope) not a threat
>To be fair, chromium has an inordinate amount of access. We all trust chromium’s developers but I’ve never met them. So it’s a realistic risk but we (hope) not a threat.
>To be fair, Windows has an inordinate amount of access. We all trust Microsoft developers but I’ve never met them. So it’s a realistic risk but we (hope) not a threat.
I can keep going to point out how flawed this line of reasoning is, especially the second one with forced push for Recall.
It’s weakly worse to trust your OS + Browser + third party, than just OS + Browser.
Moreover, small projects can be purchased more easily. See PIA. Users need to stay updated about ownership changes. It might be viable for us, but not for everyone.
Uh oh. What do I need to know about PIA and do I need to cancel my subscription?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682
The eff makes privacy badger if you trust that organisation more
The ones using declarative blocking (like everything compatible with Safari or newer Manifest V3 web extensions for Chrome and Firefox) don't need access to your browsing context.
They're not as powerful as the ones that are able to inject content into visited pages or programmatically inspect and block/alter HTTP requests, but personally I think it's a reasonable tradeoff for the reasons you mentioned.
Chrome/Google got a very bad rep for pushing this change, and I don't want to speculate about their actual motivations, but the security aspect of it seems sound to me.
With uBlock Lite (which uses MV3), it's also possible to additionally grant "full site access" on a site by site base in case the rules-based blocking alone isn't enough; that seems ideal to me.
It really is not a reasonable tradeoff because it effectively freezes the tools the blockers have in the ongoing arms race while the advertisers are able to adopt new tricks. Which is also why advertising companies (which includes all major browser makers) would like to pass it off a reasonable tradeoff.
I'll believe Google cares about extension security when they allow the user to trivially disable auto-updates.
That would be the express road to long-term unpatched vulnerabilities.
There's basically two ways to have safe web extensions: Carefully control their entire supply chain (which could easily cause big antitrust problems for Google as the vendor of the most popular browser), or minimize the things they have access to.
It is the better road, and the road chosen by most other things that aren't SaaS, including Google's other most popular thing, Android. Keep the default to auto-update, fine, but let me disable that, as the Android app store does. Attacks from previously trusted extensions (and apps) being updated and then doing malicious things (requesting new permissions to do them is not significant friction) are worse and more frequent than old unpatched extensions being vulnerable to something. (That "something" likely being in the realm of XSS or click-jacking from a malicious page, much harder to widely exploit.)
I'm sure it's happened, but I haven't heard of an extension suffering from a significant "unpatched vulnerability" and being exploited in the wild -- I have heard of things like this click-jacking issue in Privacy Badger: https://blog.lizzie.io/clickjacking-privacy-badger.html No wild exploits afaik, just the PoC, and the ultimate worst-case impact was just (reversibly) disabling the extension for the page or a site, which isn't very severe. Perhaps a more advanced extension like Ruffle that uses Rust and WASM has a more severe attack surface than the majority of extensions written in JavaScript, but even if it does, it must be exploited by a malicious page targeting it, vs. the alternative of auto-updating to a malicious version and doing whatever it can get away with immediately.
Extensions getting taken over or just transferred to new owners and updating to do something new and malicious is quite routine and multiple examples come readily to my mind. The first to come to mind is Stylish, several years ago: https://robertheaton.com/2018/07/02/stylish-browser-extensio... (I was not impacted because I didn't update the extension during its vulnerable window, which was months, and apparently over a year for Chrome.)
The safe way to handle these issues is to let users turn off auto-updating, and to have actual policies to mitigate the damages from malicious extensions. Firefox itself will disable extensions that become known to be defective in someway, this can be independent of whether the issue is an unpatched vulnerability, whether there's a patch/update to address it, whether the extension isn't just bugged but doing something malicious, whether it always was malicious from first install or just suddenly became malicious... See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-cause-issues-ar...
If adblockers have a huge amount of access, then consider how much access ads themselves have.
uBlock Origin is open source.
They have less access? When I visit my national healthcare website extensions can look at my traffic, but there are no ads.
I'm not saying ad blockers are bad, but it's not like we didn't have extensions being subverted in the past.
You're taking about access you're afraid an extension might be exploited to expose versus ad networks and social media plugins that are known to expose.
I'll take the potential bogeyman over the real one, thanks.
Since you missed it: theyre talking about extensions having access to portals where no ads exist
I am pretty sure most extensions (or at least ublock) can be set to stay off on specific websites? The extension can have an extra list of known safe sites that don't have ads where the extension stays off by default (should still be turn on-able because the list might be outdated).
In uBlock's case, when you first install it on Firefox you are peomoted to give it permission to "Access data for all websites that you visit". Even if you disable adblocking on a specific website Unlock still has access to it and can see it.
I didn't miss it. That exposure is only a problem if the ad blocker extension misbehaves. It's a theoretical problem.
If you go to your government’s office and they give you a list of names of known advertisers, then walk along your merry way and use the list to not engage those advertisers, the only trust you need is the source of the information on that list, not the list or your observance to it.
Your observance of it is open source in the case of ublock. The list should still be scrutinized, it’s a local system with an unverified source. That’s all.
You can disable your adblocker on any site you wish. If you're paranoid, you have control
You can disable your ad blocker on sites that have no ads.
Have you ever met the Chrome developers? Why would you trust them more than gorhill?
This is part of the broader conversation about digital privacy
"With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users."
- Richard M. Stallman, 2011, writing in Der Spiegel
He was right. He was always right. About all of it. People didn't listen, or perhaps were never introduced to his ideas. Software grew faster than the idea of free software (on some level this was inevitable, since the latter is by definition a subset of the former).
And so, the noose tightened a little more every year.
The remedy has never changed: you must explain to people why freedom is important, and what the terrible consequences are of non-freedom. Refer them to the free software ecosystem, Linux and the FSF. Many will not listen. But whether they listen is to some extent irrelevant. Life is more fulfilling when it is lived ethically. By doing your part to advocate for freedom and against its enemies, you are at least making your own welfare better, and hopefully someone else's too.
Lots of comments here remind me of another rms quote: "They seem to have learned the habit of cowering before authority even when not actually threatened. How very nice for authority. I decided not to learn this particular lesson."
You must have missed the other news this week. Linux has joined the dark side too. Banning people based on nationality is certainly against freedom and any kind of ethics worthy of being called that.
> Linux has joined the dark side too. Banning people based on nationality
"Linux" is not banning anybody. They must comply with the sanctions against Putin regime that many governments in the world raised, in response to insane Putin's behavior.
Linux is not banning people based on nationality, is banning people based on their employers that is a different question. Linux has every right to ban somebody that would be working for a cartel, for example. This is a win-win for the people banned also, because protects them to be targeted and forced by the Russian regime to participate on war crimes.
Calling about "mafreedom!" and "your lack of ethics" just looks deranged and out of the reality. "mafreedom to kill you (and you must help me to build the bombs or are a very bad guy)" is preschool level material. Not even funny as a joke. They really think that we are so stupid?
> Linux lacks ethics
Since 2022 the Russian president is sending 1000 Russians a day to a sure death, could stop the carnage at any time, and couldn't care less about it. Most Russians support him and don't care also. I will not accept any lesson on ethics.
> Since 2022 the Russian president is sending 1000 Russians a day to a sure death, could stop the carnage at any time, and couldn't care less about it. Most Russians support him and don't care also. I will not accept any lesson on ethics.
Could you spell out the exact relevant conditions that you believe disqualify someone from delivering a "lesson on ethics"? It seems a priori unlikely that you could find criteria that are not obviously tortured and self-serving while also granting this qualification to a typical US citizen, especially one who has worked for any major tech company (as is the case for many posters here).
Maybe you should be banned from this discussion forum? After all, you are from the same country that dropped atomic bombs on civilians and remains the only country in history to have done so. Any lesson on ethics from an American is by definition facetious, right?
> This is a win-win for the people banned also, because they are in a vulnerable position to be forced by the Russian regime to commit crimes.
Nonsense.
If your concern is that a maintainer might be strongarmed into getting surreptitious changes in the linux kernel, that's a misplaced concern because:
1- the maintainer in question didn't have access to approve changes across the whole linux kernel, but only on the drivers that they were maintaining (mainly Baikal electronics hardware, I assume. I.e. the Russian government could sabotage the drivers for hardware developed inside Russia itself, not exactly something that we'd truly have to worry about)
2- just because an individual, working in the open and with a clear/known identity (and association with a bankrupt Russian hardware design firm) has been excluded, it doesn't mean that a government might give up trying to sneak in changes. They can just create new personas (just like with "Jia Tan" of xz fame)
I understand that the Linux kernel got their hand forced, but this is just stopping a volunteer from contributing (and feeling welcome), in an open source project in which they had been involved for several years. It's a win for the Linux kernel (because they are not going to get a slap on their wrists), but it's not a win for the affected individuals
To elaborate, if you're genuinely thinking that:
1- the affected maintainer has any concern of potentially being strongarmed
2- the affected maintainer appreciates being excluded from a project in which they worked on for several years
Just read their goodbye message in lkml:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2m53bmuzemamzc4jzk2bj7tli22ruaa...
I missed it, apparently. Link?
They banned people employed by sanctioned organisations from being maintainers. This one worked for a company making hardware for the Russian military.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41932225
The company in question entered bankruptcy in August 2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikal_CPU#Bankruptcy
I'm not arguing for/against the exclusions due to sanctions. I think the benefit of banning people who used to work for a banned entity is minimal, but after all, if they are still using an email address provided by that sanctioned entity (alumni access?) of course they haven't disentangled themselves fully from that entity
This is obviously unfortunate but I think the issue is a lot bigger than Linux. It should serve as a reminder that there are no liberals in war.
The civil liberties you take for granted, in a major war, they will be gone. They will die in one day and it will take decades to get them back if ever. Remember that in WW2 America was throwing Japanese citizens into internment camps and the other side was doing far worse. Things that are unfathomable today but in a war with sufficiently high stakes they will happen again and more.
Even at war, the USA was still much more "liberal" than Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan: for starters, they didn't put any German citizens / German descendants in a concentration camp.
The Japanese descendants/citizens living in the USA were treated different because of racism. You can argue that having a racist government isn't compatible with being "liberal", but it's a matter of degree. Having a democracy that doesn't allow non whites to vote is still more "liberal" than having a monarchy / dictatorship
> for starters, they didn't put any German citizens / German descendants in a concentration camp
False: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_America...
Define "concentration camp".
If you mean "a place where many of a certain category of people are held", then yes, we did. If you mean "place where many of a certain category of people are held and killed", then no, we didn't.
Technically, the first definition is at least as correct as the second one. But colloquially, the second one is what many people understand.
You cannot compare the camps that German citizens were held in by the US to Dachau.
I actually agree with you that the term “concentration camp” is inflammatory and misleading when applied to the internment camps used to hold Axis citizens and Japanese-Americans. But the comment I was replying to was attempting to draw a contrast between the Japanese internment and the treatment of German citizens, when in fact German and Italian citizens were interned during the war. In fact I’ve actually visited one of the internment camps, in Montana.
This is not true and you know it. Re-read Linus' comment if you think this is about sanctioned organizations.
And in any case, the leader of an open project should do everything to keep the project open, including defying an immoral and unjust law, or at the very least doing bare minimum compliance. They certainly shouldn't happily jump on the bandwagon.
Cry me a river.
make a tv movie called the craigslist killer and get every news program and social media troll room to hype it.
change began with smartphone release and accelerated.
the old internet with only the top half of the iq chart participating was better.
Mac apps have never bern restricted to the App Store, so I’m not sure the idea of “sideloading” makes sense to apply there. I still know what you mean though.
By default they are restricted since several years ago. Let's remember we are a minority, most people leave defaults as they come.
They really aren't. Anything signed will load, whether you download it from the App Store or not.
Yes, there are some extra steps involved in loading unsigned programs, and the process is designed to make it sound a bit scary. I think that's the right tradeoff, reasonable people may differ.
But we're talking about the App Store vs. not-the-App-Store, and again, there is nothing which could reasonably be described as a restriction involved in installing the same binary from either of those sources. The only difference is the details of where it comes from and how to install it, and clicking on a dmg or pkg is still a fully-supported workflow with no warnings or other interference.
I, for example , i'm scared of using YouTube alternative clients like re(vanced) et simila, i'm personality scared to have my youtube/gmail account banned.
In case you watch on an Android phone: Newpipe doesn't even use your account, so the possibility of getting banned for it is much smaller.
You can make playlists in it and track your history (locally), so I don't think it's inferior to the official app. On the contrary.
Also, these new Android phones have the option to modify which app opens youtube links by default, so it's easy to just list Newpipe instead of the official app.
The only downside are downtimes a few times per year when YT changes something and Newpipe devs are making a fix, which never took more than a few days.
If you make a new account, they'll only ban that one.
I've been permanently banned from Reddit for really dumb reasons more times than I can count. The first time, I was sad. Now, I know it's a war between users and admins, and an individual account isn't worth very much.
Reddit bans are one thing, but your Gmail/Google Drive account getting banned? Not worth it, not over fucking Youtube ads. Remember, you don't have any recourse against Google bans.
Seems like the better solution would be to get off Gmail and Google Drive if you are otherwise unable to manage that risk. Having your digital life depend on the whims of some company with a TOS that boils down to "we can do whatever we want and you have no recourse" is irresponsible. Watching youtube without ads is hardly the biggest risk factor here.
So don't use google products then.
Why do you assume you can only have one Google account?
Better to have no Google account at all. (Actually I have multiple, using each only for very limited, non-essential purposes.)
It's frustrating to see so many people adopting a 'perfect consumer' mentality, where they're more willing to accept limitations on their digital freedom than to explore their options.
It might make more sense/be more palatable if you think of it as manifestations of particular inter-societal evolutionary strategies.
And that people actually have less control over their actions than anyone is willing to acknowledge or believe.
It's like the humans turned into cattle in the seventh season of Supernatural, except they are doing it to themselves.
Normies were an adaptation for social cohesion of followers of chieftain, it wasn't supposed to scale beyond, say, thousand people, MSM just parasitize on this instinct.
bwahaha what. sad.
Those friends are why I own AAPL. Limit buy order for one more share of AAPL added to my IB before posting!
The reason I use iPhone is because it's not a Google product. Coincidentally, iPhone is the only realistic alternative.
Do you really think it mattered whether the people in Jonestown drank Kool Aid or Flavour Aid? What matters is the poison and both Apple and Google ship plenty of it.
What options do I have? Not be a member of society?
As a wikipedia contributor (aroound 10-13 year old account) but not really serious, i have no kind words for wikipedia.
The trolling and brigading is alive and well there.
Thats the reason i stopped contributing.
As my name would suggest, I live in a hotly contested part of the world and I have hundreds of pages in my watchlist.
The amount of "bjp it cell" work they put in to portray their world view on Wikipedia is astounding.
Ithought naively for a few years I could fight them but I simply couldnt.
They just March across pages, make edits with their clear intentions and make you the enemy.
I remember a time when I had a particular "pronoun" ish word on certain pages and that was swiftly being edited out as soon as I changed it.
It became hopeless.
Besides, they just go "Well since this is "Indian" page, we are responsible to maintaing it in our image".
I dont really use Wikipedia these days because of their hate.
> bjp it cell
I'm not Indian, I have no specific interest, I'm reading to pick up PoVs outside my own:
BJP IT Cell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BJP_IT_Cell
That's a hell of a propaganda machine you're dealing with there.i.... am not dealing with it. i threw in the towel when it became unsustainable emotionally and physically.
edit: i had a relative who was borrowing a photographer friends camera and taking those news worthy shots for lulz and out of sheer boredom. next thing we know, he is on twitter doing some discussion and the was doxed, threatened with calling the cops and his past dug up just because he used a handle that had links to his afk name. it was terrible for him. and i would say it was all state sponsored.
he had to nuke a lot of his online presence and this was around 4years ago when he was around 20. you can imagine.
this was all thanks to that BJP it cell. these minions even say as much because they literally are the law. Paid for by the state so they do represent the power of the state in covering their asses and decimating their virtual opponents.
as i said, its hopeless
with regard to our local much smaller propaganda machines, I think (by the fact that I can't reply there) you implicitly received an answer on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41953841
It’s the same on Reddit. I wouldn’t confirm if it costs of ‘teams’, since it could also include loosely organized organic behavior.
Reddit also has similar turfing efforts for Sino related news and content.
The only time this ever gets over turned, is when some news article gets traction during EU/US consumption hours, and gains its own following.
Without the full details of the edit war you were involved in, the scenario seems to be clash between your "world view" and those who reversed your edits. From your username, being from a region where a successful genocide/ethnic cleansing of a minority religious group was conducted by the majority local population only a couple of decades back, the possibility of your edits being controversial to others not necessarily the alleged "BJP it cell" is there.
>genocide/ethnic cleansing of a minority religious group
200 people of that minority were killed.
I do not deny there was a mass exodus but to say a minority was ethnic cleansing is disengenous.
Again, my comment was not about the exodus but regarding the politics regarding the last 500 years and more specifically the last 70-90 odd years of history. That has nothing minority-majority issue you are claiming it out to be.
On the topic of exodus, you know it was the governor who ordered that the minority to be removed from their homes ? I know because I was there. You might not.
Let us put this way. There were a particular group in a region which comprised around 5% of the population. In a year or two, it dropped to effectively 0%. Now the exact terminology to use for this can be taken as genocide or ethnic cleansing or the somewhat passive "mass exodus".
Regarding the edits, I wont attempt to assume that the other side are right. But there is a sensitivity around the politics and history there, with the backdrop of the secessionist movement and the genocide/ethnic cleansing. So can see possibility of differing views there, with conflicting narratives being pushed.
> On the topic of exodus, you know it was the governor who ordered that the minority to be removed from their homes ? I know because I was there. You might not.
Really! A whole population just packed their bags and left their livelihoods, homes and properties to go and live in refugee camps, just because a governor asked them to. And not because gun toting terrorists supported by the local population where roaming around targeting them for rape and murder ? I will take the words of the people who had to flee, rather than those who were complicit in the genocide/ethnic cleansing.
So lets unpack here :
You take the struggle of a region and turn it into a religious struggle (The indigenous movement in the 90's was your username.substring(2) movement), smartly the "majority" there drives out the "minority" and enjoys capture of their properties (oh just a few hundred people who moved out you know, they will not return.). Sadly, you also have the audacity to say only 200 of that minority
Blame it on the Governor (look ma..., a central government appointee did it, was not us). Super convenient. We were just informing peace loving friends from across the border where our neighbours lived. I was there and so I know
As Mahatma Gandhi said, the progress of a state is how it treats its minorities. Guess you made good "progress" treating them "....well...."
Mass exodus is also ethnic cleansing.
Wikipedia lost many good editors over a user named BrownHairedGirl. She single handedly removed extraordinary valuable editors and left a bunch of simps in her wake. The site has never recovered.
Some users even support this these days. From "the law is the law" and "you shouldn't be in business if you can't follow the laws" to "serves them right for having X opinion!"
Dividing the world into normies and others is a very odd way to characterise widespread adoption of anything. I hesitate to use the neckbeard word, but it's got overtones.
There are as many usefully curated sites, as sites where state actors curate content to hide the reptile led barcode truth from the normies.
If you want to split the categories between normies and neckbeards that's good enough a model of the world to understand the issue.
The part that I miss is we had things in public, collaborations between everyone who was interested in spending the time to access the space. This barrier was enough to keep things feeling like a community, with most of the things like this that came up being able to be addressed by internal arguments.
Now everything has to be robust to the idea that you will have neckbeards and normies interacting, and that curation is required. You have passive users, who's eyes are valuable... contributors, with divergent motivation, some pure for the joy of the project, some who want to put their agenda in front of the first group... And even external state actors pushing things at a scale that's hard to understand.
The nomenclature could use some polish, but on HN we know they mean ability to bypass technological restrictions .
I am probably not part of the "we" you are talking about, but I had no idea "normie" means that, and I couldn't infer it from the comment. In fact I inferred a completely wrong meaning from that comment (something like "unenlightened").
Isn't "normie" a pejorative word (genuine question)?
This was the basis of my response too. It's almost never said by people in contexts where it's not pejorative, to my understanding. It's a staple of incels and the elite Mensa types. It dismisses the average lived experience because iamveryspecial.
I dont think it dismisses or invalidates their lived experiences, it just recognizes that differences in interests and adoption exists.
It generally refers to a group of “normal” people. E.g in some context they are an “out” group that does not have some specialized knowledge or understanding that the “in” group would have. So it can be negative, but it generally just means someone inexperienced with the given topic area. There is an implication of otherness to using the term “normie” for the group using it but it is generally a pretty common term now. For example, imagine a bunch of policy wonks debating something in highly specific language and then someone asks “how would the normies react?” They mean, “how would people unfamiliar with the inner workings of political policy react?” Stuff like that.
It does have a negative connotation for that group in some contexts, but the usage is pretty common and softened now.
I suspect that ‘Normie’ is the normie-friendly version of an earlier 4chan-derived term, which was absolutely a pejorative.
> Isn't "normie" a pejorative word (genuine question)?
It depends on the context. It can be a synonym for "average" (mostly neutral) or "mediocre" (pejorative).
Why? It’s a salient distinction when talking about mass-adoption of technology. Social dynamics change dramatically when the ratio of neckbeards to normies is upset. I don’t like these terms either, but “neckbeards and normies” has a nice alliterative quality.
Agree! This shift not only affects the freedom of the internet but also the quality of platforms that once thrived on user input and collaboration
At the risk of sounding like a boomer, I blame smartphones.
Smartphones were the next stage evolution of the Eternal September effect.
The solution is to move to the dark web and make your site unpalatable to normies.
The posison slug strategy.
>Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
Nah, this stuff has been going on forever. See the death of Socrates for example for 'corrupting the youth of Athens' by his speech. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Socrates)
Or more recent and a very good movie (imdb all time #61) is Lives of Others about trying to smuggle some info out of East Germany. And a million other examples.
The internet has made things much easier as the tech is hard to censor.
> Have governments become more authoritarian?
Judging by the various misinformation legislation they're rushing to adopt, yes. The free internet said too many things that powerful people didn't like.
An Australian example: https://x.com/SenatorRennick/status/1834455727764869593#m
Australia is an especially bad country in this regard.
It's hardly the only especially bad country though. At this point the entire western world is pushing for it (and Russia/China are already one and two steps ahead respectively).
It's all "beer and barbie on the beach" until you realise that's all illegal.
I'm already annoyed I have to wipe my devices whenever I travel there or risk a $5000 fine and maybe jail time if they want the password and I don't give it up.
Australia has to be the least free country in the anglosphere.
How often do your devices get checked my immigration. Serious question.. I have never had anything stopped.
So far never, but it's the point they can request it and punish me if I refuse which is deeply concerning.
What? The US has been pulling this crap since 9/11, so I'm not sure what you're going on about IRT the Anglo-Sphere.
The US only has privacy rights for Americans. As a non-citizen traveler, they routinely belittle, humiliate, and violate such privacy, demanding access to people's phones at risk of detention (or at best being sent back home) being exactly one of the things they do. Ask almost any Canadian what they think about the border in the last 20 years.
I've also had them mock and belittle me for no reason ("what event are you going to?" "that sounds stupid."), just petty stuff.
I wipe my personal data when traveling to the US, which I pretty much only do for work. (And likely won't even do that anymore if Nov 5 goes to Trump)
> so I'm not sure what you're going on about IRT the Anglo-Sphere.
Australia is worse than the US for this, and worse than any other anglo country.
> The US only has privacy rights for Americans.
Yes, and Australia doesn't even have privacy rights for Australians. Hence worse.
> As a non-citizen traveler, they routinely belittle, humiliate, and violate such privacy, demanding access to people's phones at risk of detention (or at best being sent back home) being exactly one of the things they do. Ask almost any Canadian what they think about the border in the last 20 years.
The Australian border force isn't any better for this, you just don't see it because I presume you're an Australian citizen. The UK and Canada can be pretty bad as well. Shitty border personal are not unique to the US.
> I wipe my personal data when traveling to the US, which I pretty much only do for work.
The difference in the US is if you are a citizen or green card holder you can tell them to go suck eggs, and the worst they can do is confiscate your device.
In Australia, even if you're a citizen, you face IIRC a $5000 fine and possibly some jail time. So that's much worse.
They need a legal basis and they are required to cite that:
https://galballyparker.com.au/can-australian-border-force-se...
In my experience and by my reading of performance stats US Border force are far more intrusive and over bearing than Australian Border forces.
> They need a legal basis and they are required to cite that:
What is the bar for a legal basis? In practice it seems equivalent to the way cops claim to smell weed as grounds for a search.
> In my experience and by my reading of performance stats US Border force are far more intrusive and over bearing than Australian Border forces.
Anecdotes will be anecdotes, but I flew in and out of the US for years before becoming a citizen and never had issues. Honestly I found UK immigration to be the rudest and most intrusive but that was just my experience.
Also stats don't mean much since IIRC Australia stopped recording or at least making public the number of devices they search.
> What is the bar for a legal basis?
See link.
> In practice it seems equivalent to the way cops claim ...
How many times have you been asked to hand your phone over exactly? In any case, you're free to challenge, etc. See link.
> Anecdotes will be anecdotes, but I flew in and out of the US for years before becoming a citizen and never had issues.
Like most people then. Whether crossing US or Australian borders.
> I found UK immigration to be
So Australia's not the worst "anglo country" then?
> since IIRC Australia stopped recording or at least making public
Do you recall correctly? Did Australia stop? Are there Australians that have access to raw stats on health, border incidents, etc?
> See link.
A blog article from a law firm isn't a great source here, especially when contrasted with the numerous accounts of people that have been forced to unlock their devices without legal basis.
> In any case, you're free to challenge, etc. See link.
Not if a 'legal basis' is claimed.
> Like most people then. Whether crossing US or Australian borders.
Yup.
> So Australia's not the worst "anglo country" then?
Is the term anglosphere such an unfamiliar term you had to put anglo country in quotes?
Australia is the worst country when it comes to searching devices without justification, objectively going by laws and user experiences.
The UK is the worst country for being treated with a lack of respect and being asked intrusive questions in my experience.
> Do you recall correctly? Did Australia stop?
You're being overly defensive, lad.
Maybe put your patriotism/tribalism aside while having this discussion?
I read a few articles recently that said Australia had stopped recorded, so yes, fairly certain I am recalling correctly but not about to go and look it up either.
> And likely won't even do that anymore if Nov 5 goes to Trump
Lol you post was quite reasonable until that reveal.
What kind of thing do you have on your PC they’d care about?
Actually, I guess if you don’t want them to know you won’t tell me now either xD
I don’t like the idea of handing out my password any more, but wiping my PC is too much effort.
> What kind of thing do you have on your PC they’d care about?
You get that's not the point, right?
This seemed to be a fairly explicit case of “I hate traveling to Australia because of so and so”.
Sure, it’s retarded in general, but that was not what I was talking/asking about.
They apparently both have a need to travel to Australia, _and_ data on their PC that requires wiping. That makes me curious what kind of data that could be.
> _and_ data on their PC that requires wiping.
All data requires wiping because no government has a right to it without a warrant or as part of an investigation, no matter what the data is.
Yeah, no. If my 5 year old can look at it without worry, so can random airport guy number 34.
You continue to miss the point. But if you're happy handing over your personal data, and your stance is representative of most Australians, that's probably why privacy protections are so weak in Australia - most don't understand why they should care.
The wider Anglosphere is pushing this too. One organization behind it in both the UK and the US is the UK Labour Party. Yes, you read that correctly - high level Labour party operatives formed a nonprofit in the US to lobby for misinformation legislation, to ban X, and to pressure various other websites into deleting content.
> CCDH also held meetings with federal legislators while pushing for “change in USA” toward a censorious proposal it calls the “STAR framework,” which would create an “independent digital regulator” that could “impose consequences for harmful content.” STAR’s core concepts are similar to Europe’s just-instituted Digital Services Act and Britain’s even more stringent Online Safety Act, which puts the national media regulator Ofcom in charge of determining fines for uncooperative platforms.
The whole article is worth a read, where many people were targeted for innocuous stuff or in at least one case, for reporting on an article in JAMA:
https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/election-excl...
Apologies for the Substack link, but it covers (and cites) material you otherwise need a dozen links to discover.
Misinformation is an actual problem, so I don't know what you expect the government to do about it.
Nothing at all? We saw how that idea worked out in the USA.
Yes, nothing. It's better than allowing the government to decide what is fact or lie, Ministry of Truth style.
Doing nothing is working fine in the USA so far. Not all problems need to be solved, and sometimes the solution is worse than the problem.
I think a lot of people in Europe would disagree with that notion of fine
There’s an image around the internet of a dog in a burning house saying ‘this is fine’. That’s the kind of fine I have in mind when I hear that.
Those europeans (and it definitely is not all europeans or even close to it if that is what you are insinuating) should first look at what their own governments are doing.
I expect the government to enable people to think critically and make their own deicisions, primarily through adequate education.
Beyond that, no, "misinformation" is only a problem for those who want to control others.
In a perfect world I would expect the government to stop deliberately spreading misinformation, but I know that isn’t realistic.
That wasn't the question.
You don't get to dictate the discussion no matter how inconvenient that may be, just like the government doesn't get to dictate the truth.
The fight for a free and open internet is far from over
> Have governments become more authoritarian?
It's not just governments. It's people that support grandiose efforts against "misinformation", "disinformation" and "malinformation".
> Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
People don't have energy to hear wrong and dangerous opinions anymore. Everything dangerous to the current order should be banned, otherwise fascism is inevitable.
Do you think that there's a link between an extreme proliferation of misinformation and people wanting to control it?
Yes. People who want to control the information want to distribute misinformation freely and be guaranteed nobody can contest them. That's the link. The censors always will be the liars, because once you can control who can say what, it is impossible to resist the temptation to lie a little bit for a good cause. And then a little bit more. We have seen it happen many, many times.
> We have seen it happen many, many times.
Have we? I can only think of wartime censorship (which, even if it was sold for protection from enemy propaganda, was always about morale, so doesn't apply here), and authoritarian regimes, which also don't apply here.
Yes, we have. Those same people who whine about "misinformation" are repeatedly caught lying to the public - for the public's benefit, of course, which they get to define. Which only makes sense - if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselves, and needs a gatekeeper class to define it for them, then it's only a little step from that to deciding the public is not smart enough to make correct decisions based on facts, and needs to be manipulated by the same gatekeeper class by telling them what they need to hear, for their own good. Again, this happened many times just in the recent years.
> Again, this happened many times just in the recent years.
Again, when? Concrete examples if there are so many!
> if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselve
I mean, whatever one thinks of censorship this is objectively true. We have flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, people who drank bleach against Covid, people who believe Ukraine started the war against Russia, the pizzagate nonsense, people who believe in the magical powers of rhino horns and shark fin soups and on and on and on. There are, objectively, a lot of very stupid and/or impressionable people out there in the world.
> Concrete examples if there are so many!
We were told mass surveillance against US citizens doesn't happen. It did and still is. We were told healthcare reform will not force people to change their insurance coverage and healthcare providers. It turned out to be "a lie of the year". We were told US law enforcement supplying guns to drug cartels is crazy talk. It was true. We were told FBI, CIA and DOJ heads would never lie to the Congress. They did, and suffered no consequences. We were told the inflation is a temporary phenomenon that is going to go away very quickly, and is insignificant. It never did, and was very significant. We were told the hypothesis of COVID originating from Wuhan lab leaks is insane fantasy which no scientists have ever believed and it has no evidence at all behind it. It turned out to be not so. We were told migration restrictions as a way to reduce the impact of the pandemic is a racist bigotry. Then in a short time it became a mandatory policy. We were told masks are useless and nobody but medical workers should use them. Then there were mandated for everyone. We were told COVID is nothing to worry about and is less dangerous than the flu. Then 2020-21 happened. We were told lockdowns are vital and even sole person daring to go to an empty beach should be arrested because it is necessary to prevent millions of deaths. Then the same people endorsed mass protests where thousands of people gathered together. We were told 2020 protests were "mostly peaceful". They were anything but. We were told we need just a two week lockdown to flatten the curve. It turned to be many months. We were told closing the schools is absolutely necessary or our kids will die. It turned out not to be so. We were told COVID vaccines prevent the spread of the virus. They did not. We were told Hunter laptop is a Russian disinformation operation. It wasn't. We were told rumors of US government working with social media companies to censor dissenting opinions are total lies. Until the documents confirmed that's exactly what happened. We were told rumors of Joe Biden being unfit to rule are absolutely false and he's never going to be replaced as a candidate. He was.
These are just some random examples, only from recent years, I could have many more, especially if I dug deeper into the modern history. The press and the government are lying to us constantly, incessantly, brazenly. And the only way we even know they do and can challenge them on it is because they don't yet have the total control over the information. And that's why they want it.
> There are, objectively, a lot of very stupid and/or impressionable people out there in the world.
There are. But that doesn't mean some self-appointed guys that get paid for bloviating in public are now some magic geniuses that have the right to tell us all how it really is. They do not possess any such capacity and they are just as fallible as the rest of us. Except that they have been already caught, many times, lying to us.
No.
Media has always been salacious nonsense — at least, judging from the 1880s English newspapers I’ve read as part of a research writing class: they’re full of complete lies about Jack the Ripper, for instance.
Most of the discussion from government is using that perennial fact to justify suppressing true information — eg, suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story or people’s personal experiences with the COVID vaccine. Even though that collapsed both trust in media and trust in medical institutions.
The chain of custody issues alone render the laptop story incredible
To add to the sibling comment about the courts, from Wiki:
> Starting in 2021, news outlets began to authenticate some of the contents of the laptop. In 2021, Politico verified two key emails used in the Post's initial reporting by cross-referencing emails with other datasets and contacting their recipients. CBS News published a forensic analysis which examined a "clean" copy of the data obtained directly from Mac Isaac. It concluded that the "clean" data, including over 120,000 emails, originated with Hunter Biden and had not been altered
This whole thing is sounding alot like the one about Bill Murray, the son of famous atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair (not the famous one from SNL).
His mom really influenced his behavior, so it has to be a conspiracy: William J. Murray III is an American Baptist minister, and social conservative lobbyist. Murray serves as the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, a non-profit organization in Washington, D.C. that lobbies Congress on issues related to aiding Christians in Islamic and Communist countries.
It's fascinating to see the true believer. It's like those cult members that stayed in the cult when the day of the end of the world came and passed and nothing happened. They just said "well, it's probably going to happen next year". It's both sad and fascinating - there's literally nothing too ridiculous that people couldn't believe given the opportunity.
Tell that to the courts, I guess.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/business/media/hunter-bid...
Excerpt:
> The laptop and some of its contents played a visible role in federal prosecutors’ case against the president’s son, who was charged with lying on a firearm application in 2018 by not disclosing his drug use. A prosecutor briefly held up the laptop before the jury in Delaware, and an F.B.I. agent later testified that messages and photos on it and in personal data that Mr. Biden had saved in cloud computing servers had made his drug use clear.
iCloud isn’t the laptop, let’s be clear
Incredible that in this comment thread there are suggestions the Biden government is fascist, even though Biden allowed his son to be prosecuted but if the reverse happened Trump would obviously interfere.
Federal prosecutors tried to make an extremely favorable plea deal with Hunter Biden that granted immunity to a host of crimes he wasn’t charged with. The judges ended up throwing it out.
Don’t rule out a lame duck pardon, either. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton pardoned their ne’er-do-well relatives, and it’s very common for Presidents to issue pardons during their final days in office.
>Don’t rule out a lame duck pardon, either.
Biden was asked if he would pardon his son, and he said no. But this is entirely beside the point, because Trump would pardon his son without a second thought and Trump supporters wouldn't blink.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-tells-muir-wouldnt-par... https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/06/politics/biden-will-not-p... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c133mdjkl7go
He also said he wouldn’t drop out of the election.
Yeah the party spent weeks arguing with him to put the country before his desire to be a two term president. Something Trump is far too egotistical to do. But this is entirely beside the point, because the Democrat politicians are held to a far higher standard than the Republicans politicians are, especially Trump.
It's weird how every single example of supposed suppression of information is something like "hunter Biden laptop" that has been reported in news ad nauseam.
The comment you are replying to has two examples, only one of which has to do with Hunter Biden.
The Hunter Biden laptop story is highly improbable and has many typical hallmarks of Russian Disinformation. It also happens to be true. That is all there is to it.
> Have governments become more authoritarian?
They were always like this. 20 years of state funded education doesn't go into depth on this topic though. 1984 is a warning about a possible future tyranny, right?
We must work to build an inter[dark]net which ideally fully divorces the user from the government and laws of the country the user is physically in (unless the user leaks his dox).
I can't imagine the kind of people it will attract. 5% of sane people and 95% doing the most hideous things in mankind.
Law and Govs are not so bad that we should get rid of it. They do add value to society compared to a fully lawless anarchic community/tools/etc. There is a place where freedom does have to stop and trespassing that frontier will have consequences.
We don't need to through all our laws and Gov (especially in Western countries where really it's not so bad). But instead, we need better law, law enforcement, etc... The key part is it's up to us to fight for it.
> They do add value to society compared to a fully lawless anarchic community/tools/etc.
Think it depends on how large you want your communities to be. It should be fine until some 200 people.
We already have that. Why are you commenting here?
In the end, the real service social networks offer is moderation.
I mean it's a pretty fundamental tenet of liberty that you have the freedom to do things only to the extent that you don't harm others.
And it's a simple consequence of scaling that the more massively you scale a communication system like the internet the more pathways there are for person A to harm person B.
So naturally there end up being more cases evaluating harm that involve the internet. Some of those cases will involve ordinary judicial things like injunctions.
And all of that is true regardless of whether you believe any one particular injunction is justified or unjustified. It's just a matter of what happens at scale.
You can, of course, try to give up the notion that liberty ends when you start causing harm, and many people have gone down that path. But for those of us who are still in the liberty camp, these questions are difficult and involve weighing a number of concerns and claims. And anyone who thinks they have easy answers is probably just deeply confused or high on rhetoric.
The problem here is how you define harm. "Sticks and stones may break my bones But words shall never hurt me." used to be the commonly accepted Wisdom, and with that definition you don't need to controll what others are allowed to say. I don't think it's a coincidence that governments are all to happy to get rid of that sentiment for exposing their lies does harm them.
Most of these cases don't involve any actual harm beyond hurt feelings, so that's largely a red herring.
Not sure what cases you are referring to, but “Hurt feelings” in India have caused multiple riots, resulting in utter carnage, spilling over to years, decades longs strings of terrorism and reprisals against minorities.
Feelings are the reason people get up to live in the morning.
I get why we used to make that statement. In a way it’s about rationality mattering, and how feelings being hurt are different from actual hurt.
In the context of this conversation, I’ll argue its an un-pragmatic dismissal of a pertinent fact.
I’ll make this argument: “At the scales we are talking, and across the breath of human cultures, feelings end up mattering.”
That's the kind of lame excuse that fascists and elitists always resort to in order to increase their power and shut down speech they dislike. Freedom of expression is absolutely essential to the long-term future of humanity. If preserving that fundamental human right means that some emotionally fragile people start riots then so be it, that is an acceptable cost.
Your "fact" is merely a matter of opinion.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence.
Obviously we shouldn't start riots, but if you make hate speech, there may be consequences accordingly.
And I'm sure in your mind you or those you approve of will be the ones to define what is "hate speech"?
Freedom of speech absolutely does mean not being prosecuted for your speech.
These days, causing hurt feelings is called violence by many people. Or sometimes, saying nothing at all is.
Are you saying that hurt feelings aren't harm? Words can hurt too you know, e.g. popular black footballers getting racist abuse anytime they go online is harmful to their mental health; trans people being told to kill themselves because they're Satan's spawn and pedophiles and what not also take severe hits to their mental health.
Pain is different from harm you know. When people's feelings are hurt by truth or even just my existence as a "white male" then sorry but that is not me harming you but you refusing to grow up.
Anyway, I'll believe that "progressives" actually care about how others feel when they start treating those not on board with their ideology with anything other than scorn or schadenfreude.
> When people's feelings are hurt by truth or even just my existence as a "white male" then sorry but that is not me harming you but you refusing to grow up
And this is of course not what anyone is talking about, thanks for the useless strawman. It's stuff like football players being told to die, compared to monkeys, and mannequins with their names being hanged from bridges (Vinicius Jr) only because their skin colour is black. Or monkey chants and bananas being thrown at them.
There is a critical principle in English common law: de minimus non curat lex.
Paraphrased, the law does not concern itself with trifles. Mean words causing hurt feelings qualify. I acknowledge that it can be a very big deal for the person on the receiving end: it's the sort of thing we should (and do) socially discourage, or moderate (or not) at the platform level.
But no, I don't think it rises to the level of harm, in that there should be no remedy under law, criminal nor tortuous.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/de_minimis_non_curat_lex
you need to acknowledge the difference between telling you to kill yourself vs killing you. One is clearly more harmful than the other.
then imagine living with free speech vs with no free speech. One is clearly better.
combining the two ideas, there is always going to be a gray zone in the middle. It is not obvious at all that where you want to draw the line is optimal.
It's just politics... Replace "open internet" with "land" and imagine countries (ie people) are attempting to block others access to some resource. It was naive to assume that the internet wouldn't adhere the nature of our reality.
That’s not a fair comparison: land is finite in a way that the open internet isn’t.
Yep. It's hard for us to un-learn the instincts taught by millions of years of evolution. We see scarcity in everything, even where there is none.
Is it instinct at play here or is this what you are taught by those who depends on it?
In my experience people are more than happy to share if left to their own devices.
The problem isn't that we "see scarcity", it's that we intentionally introduce scarcity. You can make more money with scarcity. It's a lot harder to make any money without scarcity, even.
Instead of Napster letting you download any song anyone ever bothered to digitize, we now have a dozen different music streaming services giving you access to the music from whichever publishers they managed to sign deals with and you have to pay a monthly fee and can only use a number of devices at the same time and not share with friends and family unless they also pay for the access.
Yes, of course there are good reasons for this: without paying, the artists don't get paid and that means making music becomes no more than an expensive hobby and yadda yadda but that's my point: we may have corporeal justifications for the scarcity we impose on the Internet but the scarcity exists and we deliberately created it and use the police and military to enforce it.
In fact, the most valuable resource on the internet is finite: atention with the possibility of influence those who give it to you. This is already a question of national security.
Human attention and energy is relatively limited though, and the medium of the Internet and its control is just for that
Clearly you miss the point or don't understand politics, if you think the matter or comparison I made has anything to do with finitism. Politics has everything to do with conflicts in wants. For example, some people want free speech, and other people don't want other people to be able to spread lies or what they perceive as lies. Do you see how these wants are at odds with each other, or that two people can have opposing wants? Such conflicts can arise wherever humans interact with each other, and the internet isn't different somehow because it is less finite. I mean, do you think there aren't people out there who don't want to police the internet?
Simply, put, politics is not limited to matters of finitism. And the example I gave, is a perfectly fitting example of where politics is evident.
>>> Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
Yes, naive to think that we could live in a world without fences. The internet makes it very cheap to tear down fences. Yet, good fences make for good neighbors. It was always naive to think that governments would let a torn-fences world, remain untouched.
Internet transitioned from a fun toy for nerds to a serious tool used by the masses, and needs to be regulated accordingly. Looking back, it was extremely naive to think that even though we regulate every single aspect of social life, the internet would remain the bastion of freedom just because it would be cool if it did. Think about all the rules we have about what can and what cannot be said not to break social cohesion on TV, or radio, or newspaper, or street sidewalk, or workplace, or family gathering - the internet is moving in the same direction. The anarchy was never meant to last.
"needs to be"
No it doesn't. And neither do we need regulation for what I can say at a family gathering or on the street.
Thought policing and other neo-puritanian movements can go fuck themselves.
> And neither do we need regulation for what I can say at a family gathering or on the street
It's slightly different, since you don't do your banking, taxes, business, information gathering at that family gathering; nor can malicious actor effortlessly spam misinformation/scams at every family gathering/street.
Especially considering we know multiple countries have extremely active operations online trying to sway opinions their way, it's naive to compare the internet to a neutral public place.
We don't regulate letters or phone calls (not to mention in-person meetings) in the way that today's governments want to regulate the internet.
> Internet transitioned from a fun toy for nerds to a serious tool used by the masses, and needs to be regulated accordingly
Don't give in like that. Let those normies get hurt. It's their personal problem.
There are a lot of lessons to learn here
1. The Streisand effect. No-one on HN gave a monkeys about this dodgy news agency till today. Now half of us have read the archive about how they promote propaganda & fake news. Your reputation takes a hit
2. There is no absolute definition of “freedom”. Wikipedia is a fantastic resource for humanity in general and I think should be defended. But as more and more of humanity come to live more and more online, then the legal and cultural norms will shift and shuffle - courts for two hundred years have assumed they can order anyone in their jurisdiction around and often not in their jurisdiction- and that’s kind of the point of courts. So what is freedom? It’s what we the demos and the courts agree …
3. An example is in the order (I mean on the Streisand effect - when the %#}#% hell would I ever read a court order from India ?!) - it says “herein to take down/delete” - this bespeaks a failure to understand the world on the level of “who are the Beatles”. Take down - fine this is part of how we agree norms and limits of courts. Delete. Are you kidding me. Does that imply from everywhere else? Wow.
Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information. Everyone can write things there, including people with biases and conflicting interests. Their rules about editing are really annoying and unfair, they don't care about facts.
I enjoy reading Wikipedia sometimes, but it's a broken system, a lot of truths missing in it's articles because of crap editors and political propaganda. Also it's admins are toxic and abuse their little power they have over every editor there.
Try editing some articles there, and you will see the dark side of Wikipedia.
> Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information.
It's about as reliable it gets. It cites sources, has whole history available, has little conflicts of interest and has transparent editorial guidelines and process.
Many people are probably shocked to find views in WP that aren't aligned with what their newsmedia reports and frames.
Totally agree.
The key point, which perfectionists miss or more likely just don't agree with, is about being less wrong. WP is time and again show to be less wrong than supposedly trusted or more formal resources.
When it started many people would look to the Encyclopedia Britannica as more reliable yet research showed that on average it contained more errors and that's with the occasional inexperienced/ rogue editor on the WP side.
EDIT: fixed my own typo! (relatable -> reliable)
Wikipedia is often wrong once you stray from mainstream topics. Subspecialties often have 1-2 super-contributors, whose blind spots and misunderstandings become part of Wikipedia. Plenty of articles also have no actual citations of their technical content.
Nobody says Wikipedia is perfect. The fact that you can point out that certain content are wrong proves what the GP said — “[It] has whole history available, has little conflicts of interest and has transparent editorial guidelines and process.”
It’s also worth pointing out that it could be you who has blind spots, not the contributors. And if you’re certain they are wrong you can always try to correct them, or create a competing topic?
> Wikipedia is often wrong once you stray from mainstream topics.
So it’s a good source for topics with the largest audience. That alone shows how beneficial it can be. At the very least, it’s a good starting point for further research.
> And if you’re certain they are wrong you can always try to correct them, or create a competing topic?
I’ve tried that before, and it’s often not worth the time. The lord of the article is often an expert Wikipedia Editor and rules lawyer with endless time to argue and revert even when they have no expert or even basic knowledge about the subject.
In order to maintain some semblance of process, Wikipedia has to approximate what is true by relying on the consensus from reputable sources, not reality itself. This means that experts are often not who you want editing an article, because experts are often poorly positioned to know what the general public knows, and what consensus is from outside their area of expertise. E.g., I have published research that contradicts information on Wikipedia, and while I am of course convinced I and my co-authors are right while Wikipedia is wrong, I would much rather have that state of affairs than a world where Wikipedia is written by everyone with a paper on a subject, and the line is drawn at whoever was the most recent editor.
> experts are often not who you want editing an article, because experts are often poorly positioned to know what the general public knows, and what consensus is from outside their area of expertise.
I would argue the opposite, since consensus from reputable sources is not the same as consensus of the general public, and unless it's a subject of study in multiple fields, the consensus in their field is their area of expertise.
Academic scholarship is generally preferred over lay sources, though there are caveats and individual instances of primary research are rarely considered indicative of consensus (usually review articles and other secondary sources are significantly preferred). However, if you do disagree with any information on Wikipedia, even if it's based on only your own primary research, I would strongly encourage you to at least tag the statements with a {{dubious}} or {{disputed inline}}[1] tag so that it can be discussed, or make an edit request[2] if you're not comfortable making the change yourself.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Disputed_inline [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_requests
That's the propaganda Wikipedia wants you to think, citing itself.
In practice, it doesn't work. The bias and delusional behavior of the editors is infectious, widespread, and has even been criticized by Wikipedia's own co-founder Larry Sanger as being overrun by "left-wing propaganda essays." He even went as far as to call it the "most biased encyclopedia in history" in an interview with Glenn Greenwald. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR6dO8U8okk)
Frankly, it does seem (following stereotypes) that left-wing people have a stronger tendency to be writers from being white-collar; while more right-wing folks are too busy with blue-collar jobs and physical labor to be writing rebuttals. A very simple example is how Wikipedia approves Vox, Slate, The Nation, Mother Jones, Jezebel, The Atlantic, Gizmodo, and Jacobin as sources, but Fox News is considered "unreliable." Permitting Jacobin and Jezebel, but not Fox, is delusional. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...)
Every source you list as "approved" either isn't listed as perennial at all (which makes me wonder, how did it end up on your list?), or has explicit carve-outs saying that statements need to be attributed due to bias. Meanwhile, Fox has had thorough discussion showing that there are substantial problems with their factual reporting on politics and science, that using them as attributed opinion sources is still fine, and that non-politics or science reporting should be examined critically but can be used. Particularly given the documents now publicly available on their handling of election coverage pretty clearly demonstrating an intentional distinction between what they think is true behind closed doors vs. reporting presented as reality (a distinction they ultimately had to admit in court), what grounds is there to dispute this policy?
Maybe you could clarify your concern by pointing to something where the public consensus from reputable sources is distinct from what Wikipedia presents, by matter of policy?
I am not going to value the other sources, as I don't know some of them, but considering Fox News "unreliable" is even tame. You are better informed if you simply not watch news at all:
https://web.archive.org/web/20241001193736/https://www.busin...
> It’s also worth pointing out that it could be you who has blind spots, not the contributors. And if you’re certain they are wrong you can always try to correct them, or create a competing topic?
No, it's not me who has the blind spots in the cases I have seen, sorry. Also, they are not worth the work to correct, since the overlord of the niche is usually someone with far too much time on their hands to argue, even when presented with incontrovertible proof. They also often have "Wikipedia editing" as a hobby, and know all the nitpicking rules of the site that they will use against you if you encroach on their domain. And yes, I tried this once for an obvious error in a math article (with no citation in the original article, mind you).
> So it’s a good source for topics with the largest audience.
Also not for topics of any political bent, but sure, if your target audience is at a high school level or below and you can separate out the facts from the editorialization, it's not bad.
At this point, I want Encyclopedia Britannica back. I would take it any day of the week over Wikipedia. The golden age of Wikipedia, when that was reversed, seems to be over.
Britannica still exists. You can find it at https://www.britannica.com/
And some of the actual citations are to easily hyperlinked pop science articles and opinion pieces, sometimes actually replacing more accurate unsourced material...
I'm honestly more concerned with how Wikipedia handles mainstream topics - i.e. the ones its editors are likely to have strong opinions about. Misunderstandings can be corrected with time, dogma on the other hand actively fights any correction.
You, and everyone else, are welcome to flag or fix every single one of these that are found.
Or just go somewhere else for our information. That seems easier.
I would change that wording to say that: it's mostly reliable, but not perfect and not as objective as it purports to be.
I’ll take Britannica any day.
I would take almost ANY real encyclopaedia, any day, for very general topics. For specifics, I would go to specific literature, or just google it to find sources myself. Often what I search is either wrong, or for example math or physics things are written in a sooo complex form, that I just cannot do anything with it.
It sounds like you're accusing Wikipedia of being both too easy to edit ("everyone can write things there") and too restrictive about who can edit ("they don't care about facts... Crap editors and political propaganda.") It sounds like your real criticism is that Wikipedia has biases and won't let you correct them. Can you provide links to some examples of bias on Wikipedia so that we can make up for ourselves how bad this is?
> Can you provide links to some examples of bias on Wikipedia so that we can make up for ourselves how bad this is?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...
Here is an example of a Wikipedia admin who spent years harassing a blogger (and a community the blogger belongs to), and it took a lot of effort and a lot of luck to make other admins admit that this was a bad thing and that it should stop.
(This is not the worst example I know of, but it is an example where Wikipedia changed its mind later, so you can agree that this was bad even if you trust Wikipedia.)
David Gerard strikes again
One very recent anecdotal example involving narwhals:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0L-3FfkXfM
Let's just say Wikipedia made an absurd lie, for years from an obvious misunderstanding, and a viciously protective editor got involved...
I mostly fact check and do notable research for obscure Wikipedia articles. This is usually a no drama environment sure I have helped delete articles that later became notable and removed true facts lacking sources. Many of these things have fixed themselves over time. My biggest fear with Wikipedia is citogenesis https://xkcd.com/978/ I have found one in a major news paper, this took three months to take down.
There has been a little bit of furor in some circles in Japan, regarding the status of Yasuke, who was a favorite of Oda Nobunaga, whether he was a samurai or not. Around September of 2015, a user by the name tottoritom made numerous edits to the Yasuke article, citing to yet-to-be-published papers by Thomas Lockley. Coincidentally, tottoritom's user page introduces himself as Thomas Lockley too, and Lockley happened to also have lived in Tottori. After some time, the citations were changed to refer to a book that Lockley published in Japan (in Japanese). (Now, if the two are indeed one and same person, he has broken a Wikipedia rule on not publishing original research.)
The book become a basis for a romanticized novel he published for western audiences, which I believe inspired the production of Netflix animation for the same character. From then on, the view that Yasuke was a samurai gained foothold, which caught some Japanese historians off-guard.
He's also had his hand on the Britannica article of the same title, and now Wikipedia cites the Britannica article too, thus completing the cycle.
I find it odd that Yasuke would be a Samurai, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of the three unifiers and a general under Nobunaga, was not.
After unifying Japan in 1590, Toyotomi Hideyoshi did not become Shogun because he was born a peasant. Only Samurai could become Shogun, and Hideyoshi was famously not one. You couldn't become a samurai, you had to be born one.
I edit a bit and it seems mostly accurate but I've followed covid origins for a while and the bit "While other explanations, such as speculations that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory have been proposed, such explanations are not supported by evidence." isn't really true. There is evidence but for some reason they only want to cite papers from the scientific establishment saying the scientific establishment is innocent.
Anything even slightly controversial across political lines cannot be trusted. Math and technical topics that don't address any drama or controversy are usually fine for reference, but there are almost always better resources if you're trying to learn about a topic from scratch.
Out of curiosity: was it marked as possible citogenesis during that period? How did the situation resolve itself?
No. I usually edit directly in Wikipedia, my edits are sourced and uncontroversial I try not to deal with the bureaucracy. I took the time to contact the original news outlet and they did the correction pretty fast, Wikipedia had been referencing a secondary sources and those were not that helpful. About five emails, maybe four hours of my time.
> Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information. Everyone can write things there, including people with biases and conflicting interests. Their rules about editing are really annoying and unfair, they don't care about facts.
This is what lecturers and teachers a tell us.
Yet it’s far and away the most accurate and comprehensive resource I know of. When I search the few topics I think I deeply understand, it’s very rarely wrong. I corrected the last error I found. It was a small one and wouldn’t have tripped the unwary.
Something can be technically correct, yet unreliable. How? Simply by reporting with a bias. The easiest example would be to look at a left (or right) leaning but accurate news organization like Vox or WSJ - they’re absolutely great at many topics, but read only one of the two and you’d have a slightly distorted view of everything. Being unbiased is incredibly hard even for newspapers, let alone a volunteer run org.
For a more specific example of wiki’s biases, think of the average Reddit bias - like their insistence of “if you can’t prove it it doesn’t exist”. A lot of people in the world would be very sad if they learnt that their god supposedly vanished.
Streisand effect is oversold.
It is temporary as heck. People will forget about anything, no matter the extent of Streisand effect and go onto the next tictok video or whatever.
Who gives a flying fk anyways about an article on wikipedia.
This seems to have an obvious counterexample?
The name of the Streisand effect is from exactly the situation of a photo nobody cared about of Streisand's house from decades ago. The fact that it can be superficially referenced is evidence of its longevity.
Not sure. Hardly anyone would remember if Streisand was a singer or actor or whoever. Now her name is mostly tied to Streisand effect, not the art she had produced.
I agree with your point of view. Maybe it was effective when it was the first effect. Like the million pixel website. Now there are million balls in the air. There are lot of current things going on. People will move on when they get tired. And the only memory they will have is "something happened".
I understand that Wikipedia has done this to not lose the possibility to appeal the court's decision. However, if the appeal is not successful and ANI wins, I think Wikipedia should just block India completely. I believe that will blow up spectacularly in ANI's face if everyone comes to know the reason for the block.
Right now only a few people in India know about the ongoing dispute between ANI and Wikipedia. A country-level block is going to bring everyone's attention to the issue which I don't think is something ANI and the incumbent party (the BJP) would want to happen.
India routinely blocks many websites, including many porn sites, but blocking something as big, popular and useful as Wikipedia is not going to go unnoticed by the Indian media.
If possible it would be better to let India block wikipedia themselves, that way the government doesn't get to shift blame on Wikipedia. Whichever way it goes the government has a lot of control over the narrative and it's a lot harder for them to hide that it is their decision to block wikipedia completely.
Governments do not hesitate to blatantly shift blame. For instance, Russian internet censorship agency blocks YouTube for a couple of months and they still pretend that it is Google's technical issue:
https://www.rbc.ru/technology_and_media/23/10/2024/6718fc469...
I’m a bit surprised Google is still serving at Russia, are they doing it to avoid loosing browser and search market share? They could not be making any money on advertising there, I assume?
> They could not be making any money on advertising there, I assume?
When they show an advertisement of, say, some asian company to a russian user, they are still making money, aren't they?
They just don't show any ads to Russian users (if the user doesn't use a VPN to the outer world).
good answer
I think it would be okay to implement country-specific article bans, but make them obvious. Like, if you are from India and visit the forbidden page, you get a large text "this article is banned in India", maybe with some smaller text explaining that it happened as a result of a court order, with a hyperlink, etc.
However, the article is still there in the database, and everyone not in India can see it. And anyone in India can ask a foreign friend to send them a copy. (Maybe someone will make a website on a different domain that will contain the banned articles from Wikipedia, making them visible for everyone.)
Basically, comply with the bans in a Streisand-effect way.
India can just block those other websites without too much fuss and not everyone has foreign friends or the technical expertise to get around the contry block themselves - and even if they do it they might not care enough. Best would be to ignore the court demand completely and force India's hand to either block Wikipedia entirely or stop their bs.
> popular and useful as Wikipedia is not going to go unnoticed by the Indian media.
without dwelling into the nuances of this case and who's on the right, it would be myopic to think that the block is not a realistic possibility.
it has been over 4 years since the TikTok ban (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23679286), and while it might be apple and oranges, it does not remove from the fact that a major site was blocked, reported widely, and is still standing to this day.
Wait and watch. Wikipedia will do anything but never leave India. It’s a funny world we live in where foreign NGOs and “organisations with good intentions” operate to control opinions of the biggest set of people in a shady neo-colonialistic manner. BBC’s antics in India should be studied in detail. NGOs and portals like caravan that sprang up out of nowhere and “stay relevant with little public support” (key phrase), serve one-sided narratives which people are now seeing through hence they elected the same leadership a third time (almost unprecedented). These narratives from BBC, Caravan are what Wikipedia uses to back their claims. They are upset that their multiple attempts at painting a leader as a perpetrator of mass genocide don’t stick in the minds of people.
> if the appeal is not successful and ANI wins, I think Wikipedia should just block India completely.
Let me see if I understand this correctly. It seems below is the sequence of events you are advocating for:
1. Wikipedia is allowed to legally represent themselves in the court of law. 2. Court looks at the case presented by ANI and Wikipedia, and decides that ANI is right and Wikipedia is wrong 3. Wikipedia should take this out on average Indian citizens, and make them pay because Wikipedia was found to be at fault in a court of law.
Makes sense
This[0] is the Wikipedia article that ANI has beef with. The claims of propaganda are all supported by ample secondary sources from Indian news organizations like Caravan Magazine and the Ken.
ANI wants Wikipedia to provide the names of the editors that added the details to the article. Once Wikipedia reveals those names, ANI will presumably sue them for defamation and force them to remove their contributions. While the edit history will remain, few are likely to read it.
Suing the editors and forcing them to retract their edits on Wikipedia will have a chilling effect on anyone Indian that tries to point out what ANI and similar organizations are doing. But if Wikipedia blocks India and the issue blows up in the media, ANI will be forced to back off and the article will stay up. Wikipedia then unblocks India. Is it a given that things are going to pan out this way? No, but it's quite likely.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_News_International
…yes it does make sense?
They’re complying within the rules fully, but if they decide the rules are too onerous or compromising on their core mission, the legally correct thing to do is to take their ball and go home.
The rest of us not in India don’t want to be affected by the rulings of a Delhi court.
If the citizens of India don’t like this outcome, it’s up to them to fix it.
Agreed. Nothing wrong with it. I was just trying to fully understand what the other commenter said.
If following the law is such a burden on them then they should by all means pack up and leave. This is also what the Delhi High Court said after Wikipedia chose to ignore its order. This applies to all western institutions and corporations. If the expectation is that, Indian courts and the Indian public should continue to bend over then that is not going to happen.
> The rest of us not in India don’t want to be affected by the rulings of a Delhi court.
How wikipedia choses to follow rulings of Delhi High Court is not India's problem. This is 100% on wikipedia to implement it without a geo block, so maybe you should take this up with Wikipedia.
> If the expectation is that, Indian courts and the Indian public should continue to bend over then that is not going to happen.
That's a pretty aggressive stance on this that is not warranted. Wikipedia is pursuing its mission of providing an uncensored source of information created by an open community for the public. Posing the situation as aggressively as you have makes it seem as if you are the one trying to make someone or something "bend over" (or whatever gross turn of phrase you'd like to use).
> (or whatever gross turn of phrase you'd like to use).
This makes it seem like your reply isn't in good faith.
So feel free to twist my words as you please, add your own interpretations to it, and accuse me of whatever you want to accuse me with. I am done discussing this topic with you specifically.
Ok I’m going to withdraw because I’m a bit confused what you are advocating for.
I initially read:
> Wikipedia should take this out on average Indian citizens, and make them pay because Wikipedia was found to be at fault in a court of law.
> Makes sense
As sarcasm (which I acknowledge is tricky to parse on the internet! But it still strongly reads that way).
But from your later comment that was not the case?
Missing sarcasm or seeing it when it isn’t there is the bane of forums. Adding a ‘/s’ is lame and detracts from sarcasm.
I was being sarcastic to the other commenter because I see complete withdrawal of Wikipedia from India as an absurd overreaction to what this case is about. That is what the parent comment is calling for, specifically, I quote "Wikipedia should just block India completely."
As to my reply to your comment, I recognize Wikipedia's right to not conduct their business in India if they chose to do so, for whatever reason. I interpret your comment as saying that there would be nothing wrong in Wikipedia exercising this right - which I agree with. So I stated my point earnestly that while I agree there is nothing wrong in exercising this right. It seems what it amounts to is that either the court rules in their favor, or they withdraw from India. If that is the expectation that India courts should just rule in their favor (even when they are in the wrong), then I am sorry but that is not acceptable.
Hope that clarifies things. Either way, I am going to withdraw from this discussion as well
This ruling seems as corrupt as they go. What kind of untruths did Wikipedia do to cause this to be «defamation»?
Step 3 would be to broadcast to all of India this corrupt ruling.
> This ruling seems as corrupt as they go
The defamation case is still ongoing. But I guess any ruling that isn't favoring Wikipedia will automatically be "corrupt"
Maybe not block it themselves, but put a prominent notice at the top linking to the case and article and see what the Indian government will do next. :)
I don't think that will help a lot. This my opinion, but I think most Indians treat western sources such as NYT, BBC to be biased/racist against India. If wikipedia were to put a banner on top, it would just end up being another entry in that list.
Are the Indian news sources cited in the allegedly defaming Wikipedia article also considered to be western biased?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_News_International covers the lawsuit as well.
"In July 2024, ANI filed a lawsuit against Wikimedia Foundation in the Delhi High Court — claiming to have been defamed in its article on Wikipedia — and sought ₹2 crore (US$240,000) in damages.[16][17][18] On 5 September, the Court threatened to hold Wikimedia guilty of contempt for failing to disclose information about the editors who had made changes to the article and warned that Wikipedia might be blocked in India upon further non-compliance. The judge on the case stated "If you don't like India, please don't work in India... We will ask government to block your site".[19][20] In response, Wikimedia emphasized that the information in the article was supported by multiple reliable secondary sources.[21] Justice Manmohan said "I think nothing can be worse for a news agency than to be called a puppet of an intelligence agency, stooge of the government. If that is true, the credibility goes."[22]"
I suppose that this might not be the most objective article on Wikipedia. I don't have context for these statements. The way that Wikipedia quotes the judge makes it sound like he's threatening to order the Indian government to block Wikipedia because Wikipedia says that ANI is government propaganda. Is that really what's going on? If so it seems extremely ironic, to the point of tacitly admitting ANI's links to the Indian government. I know hacker news has many Indian readers; can they provide some context or an alternative perspective?
No. You read the statements right. Indian judges tend to give such statements, sometimes even worse. For example, recently one judge in unrelated case gave a statement that “criminalising marital rape is bit harsh”.
The main problem in this case is that Wikimedia hasn’t complied YET with high court orders of revealing people who did the edits. ANI just went ahead and filed contempt of court case before Wiki legal team could respond. I’m not sure if initial order came with some sort of deadline or not. I guess they are trying to leverage the delay in their favour.
In my opinion, ANI and many media houses in India are partially controlled by incumbent party ( BJP ) either by incentives or manipulation, you can read about Income tax raid on BBC and some other media outlets for understanding their methods.
Some illustrative examples:
- Judge Mahesh Sharma told TV channels that "the peahen gets pregnant" only by "swallowing the tears of the peacock".
- The Delhi High Court granted anticipatory bail to a rape accused government accused after the survivor’s mother expressed that she has no objection to the same.
- In a bizarre order, the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court granted bail to a man accused of raping and impregnating a 17-year-old girl under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act on a condition that he marries he after she attains the majority age of 18.(Tamil Nadu)
- Granting pre arrest bail to a rape accused, Karnataka High Court took sexual violence jurisprudence back by decades.The court speculated why the complainant did not approach the court earlier when the accused was allegedly asking her for sexual favours. The court also questioned why the complainant went to her office late night and did not object to consumption of alcohol. The court said that the complainant’s explanation that she fell asleep after the alleged crime is “unbecoming of a woman; that is not the way our women react when they are ravished”.
Just memorizing law to a great extent doesn't elevate judges above societal prejudices and backwardness.
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-40116001
[1]: https://sabrangindia.in/article/delhi-hc-grants-pre-arrest-b....
[2]: https://sabrangindia.in/madras-hc-grants-pocso-accused-bail-....
[3]: https://sabrangindia.in/article/falling-asleep-after-being-r...
Unrelated:
>> "In my opinion, ANI and many media houses in India are partially controlled by incumbent party ( BJP ) either by incentives or manipulation, you can read about Income tax raid on BBC and some other media outlets for understanding their methods."
By the Indian court standards, HN would be compelled to globally take down this topic.
In theory that the quote starts with "In my opinion" should protect HN in this scenario.
Wikipedia almost exclusively words things as if they are know facts (because they usually are), which means they lose the safety of it being an opinion
The Wikipedia article in question says that ANI has been "accused of..."
Wikipedia is saying it's a known fact they've been accused of that, which this subthread shows is true as someone accused them of it.
Sounds like an authoritarian government that should be ignored.
Governments have ways of making themselves difficult to ignore.
Do they? What is the administrative division of governance in Liechtenstein?
I don't know, and you might, but we mostly live blissfully unaware in the undergirding bueracracy that surrounds us.
And if Liechtenstein calls for my head for saying that I know nothing about them, fantastic. I'll still never hear about it. The have no power where I am.
But a government threatens an internationally beloved and fundamental institution built by the volunteering work of individuals across the globe for the pure love of sharing knowledge because it accurately made a statement? The Indian high court may as well allow universal atrocities for all the respect for sovereignty it will generate at home and abroad.
Liechtenstein is a member of interpol, so if they have a warrant for your arrest, that might actually be a problem for you, even if you are not going there.
Since I am not in any eurozone, I am outside of Interpol's reach, and even if I am enemy #1 in Liechtenstein no one would care. Interpol is still bound by international law and budget constraints. An arrest warrant looks fine and scary when issued by another country but extradition costs money even when there are agreements in place. I might be some minor value as a trading token between my locale and Liechtenstein, so my game to beat is to be more valuable to my locale than as a trading pawn. That's a pretty easy target.
Is this some strange fantasy roleplay?
If you go murder someone in Liechtenstein, there are only a small handful of places in the world where you are not guaranteed to be arrested and extradited back to Liechtenstein to face trial, at their government's request, should it ask and should you be found.
In that small handful of places, it's still a crapshoot.
Extradition costs are generally paid by the interested state, by the way.
You're missing the point. The parent comment isn't talking about murder but "defaming" someone on fucking Wikipedia. Even if Liechtenstein takes a big issue with this to the point of extradition, the government of wherever the parent commenter lives likely will not allow it.
And yeah, it is a fantasy because Liechtenstein isn't a backwards and stupid place like India is.
> Since I am not in any eurozone, I am outside of Interpol's reach
Interpol has 196 member states.
A market with billions of users is a bit different than Liechtenstein
The economy is not the government, and banning sites clearly doesn't work well.
Usually the worst that happens for services in foreign countries is that they get blocked, and wikipedia will survive not being accessible in India.
If the choice is between revealing editors and exiting India altogether, doesn't seem like a hard choice. The people in India will suffer without Wikipedia, but most have VPNs to access blocked sites anyways.
People existed before Wikipedia so it's not a big deal if it's gone
Wikimedia India is an independent nonprofit, with executives in India who could be held in contempt by the Indian courts.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_India
Wikimedia India has nothing to do with the operation of Wikipedia.org and does not appear to be a party to the case. It is just a local wikipedia editors club.
This. They're following the Orban-Erdogan-Harper (International Democratic Union) playbook - purge the judiciary of independent judges, control the news media, and open culture-war fronts to distract and sap the strength of opposition while riling up your base. The situation in the world's largest democracy is a very dire one.
> purge the judiciary of independent judges, control the news media, and open culture-war fronts to distract and sap the strength of opposition while riling up your base
I don’t like whataboutism as much as anyone else, but if we’re going to criticise one country I’d like to point out that with Murdoch et al, you’ve got the same stuff happening in a lot of countries (US/UK/Aus off the top of my head) too. And unlike some places like the US, in India the judges are relatively much more independent politically.
What you’re likely missing is that a significant chunk of the population itself (and likely some judges) hold such views. You don’t need to politically cajole a judge if they already share the same view, do you?
Indeed.
Start your own Wikipedia.
That's an actual quote? That's so, juvenile. And it admits pretty much all of the 'defamation' that Wikipedia is being sued for.
Also a bit stupid to ask someone to not work in India if they point out they have no legal presence there. If they really have no presence in India it might make most sense to just call their bluff. The government does indeed have the power to block the webpage but there's no winning against a government that is willing to go that far. One can only hope that blocking wikipedia is unpopular enough to give the government pause.
Yes. This is why a lot of people leave India. The legal system is crap. And it has effects on everything else.
What a joke of a country.
You mean what a joke of a government?
Why not both?
Wait and watch. Wikipedia will do anything but never leave India. It’s a funny world we live in where foreign NGOs and “organisations with good intentions” operate to control opinions of the biggest set of people in a shady neo-colonialistic manner. BBC’s antics in India should be studied in detail. NGOs and portals like caravan that sprang up out of nowhere and “stay relevant with little public support” (key phrase), serve one-sided narratives which people are now seeing through hence they elected the same leadership a third time (almost unprecedented). These narratives from BBC, Caravan are what Wikipedia uses to back their claims. They are upset that their multiple attempts at painting a leader as a perpetrator of mass genocide don’t stick in the minds of people.
As an Indian, you cannot understand the despair this makes me feel. ANI is a bit like privatised Pravda operating in service to the government, yet, still pretending to be independent journalism. Wherever there is a critic of the government, ANI exists to slander such critics as a service.
As a discerning reader, you learn to avoid mainstream media that quotes ANI (don't even consider watching a TV channel). You seek out alternate information sources. As the entity aligns closer with the ruling party and the mega-corporations like Adani that are aligned with it, you basically witness an octopus take over all information communication in India.
Then you get harsher and harsher laws regulating social media. You get no new laws protecting your speech. You witness a general fatalism set in on the few Indian comment sections that still think this stuff is wrong. But one day you see it on HN and realise everyone is basically powerless here.
Foolish maybe, but I genuinely hoped the open and open-sourced side of the internet would transcend borders. There must exist an information ecosystem that is above government. But Linux bans Russian devs, wikipedia is blocked worldwide because they wouldn't reveal an editor's biodata to India, social media platforms regulating information appoint information officers to enforce dictatorial government orders.
Where is the technology that can challenge this? At what point can the principle of "code is law" support free human expression instead of serving the whims of the latest oppressive regime?
I would implore any devs making open-source censorship-proof tools to consider the Indian context as ground zero.
> Linux bans Russian devs
The devs weren't banned, they were removed from the maintainers list
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/10/russi...
What you're talking about, trancending government orders, is inherently illegal. Any tech that enables it must be distributed, untrackable, and private. You're basically describing the darknet.
"Code is law" is a meme.
Law is a social concept, it has many parts, the statutes, that serve as mementos for past power struggles, the active part which consist of the courts, prosecutors' discretion, enforcement, and of course society itself, as the workings of these reified components reflect society itself.
Code can of course model some of these, be part of law, and even it can try to complement or supplant certain roles and/or functions from the aforementioned ones, but as long as there are humans in the loop code will not be itself law.
Sure, soon we'll probably end up with RoboCops patrolling the streets, and maybe even AI writing much of the statutes, and eventually even AI making most of the law, but even then code won't be law.
"Code is law" is a phrase that has pervaded in smart contracts and crypto. That is the technology that can challenge this.
Never understood how. Law is messy. There is no algorithm that can properly capture it.
I’d like to clear up some misconceptions about jurisdiction going on in this thread, purely from the perspective of international law.
As a matter of sovereignty, a state can exercise judicial jurisdiction over its territory, over its nationals, over national security concerns and over the most grave crimes.
A state’s jurisdiction can apply even to foreign people/companies who have no presence in said state at all. What the state’s courts can’t do is enforce their decisions abroad.
I know nothing about Indian law, but I know it has the right to set its own judicial jurisdiction. Accordingly, it can surely grant courts the power to order worldwide content bans. The real questions at stake in this case are:
1) does Wikipedia have any presence in India, so that Indian courts can compel it to follow their orders?
2) which countries where Wikipedia operates are able to receive requests from Indian courts and take enforcement action based on them?
It might not be fair, or right, but that’s the way it is. Thankfully, the obstacles to enforcing absurd orders abroad are usually high enough that they discourage said orders, or render them ineffective.
Organizations like Wikipedia need to make sure they have no satellite offices, and just completely independent affiliates with sharing agreements. That way when a silly court tries to ban something worldwide they can be rebuked.
It's not the way it is, unless people accept it as such.
Sorry, but VPNs exist, Wikipedia is inherently clonable and downloadable. Silicon rock beats Indian paper courts, any way you slice it, unless Wikipedia chooses to back down.
They shouldn't.
For reasons nobody understands, paper beats rock.
I agree that the decision is wrong and unfair, and that it can be easily circumvented. That does not negate India’s right to legislate as it wants, nor does it prevent the Indian government from repressing citizens who choose to defy the law.
It’s very unfortunate, but there is more to this case than simply negating a country’s jurisdiction or encouraging nationals to challenge it.
Cue an Australian Prime Minister saying "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia" [0].
Yes, India can make ridiculous unenforceable laws, same as any country, but that doesn't actually do anything: Laws only matter when they can be enforced.
In this case India trying to enforce a worldwide ban on this story is clearly unenforceable. And because of VPNs that means that enforcing a national ban on this story is clearly unfeasible. However, because the people who make the laws are ignorant of the technical reasons why it's unfeasible they'll carry on and do it anyway. The Australian PM was in the same boat, made the same mistake, and was widely ridiculed for it.
[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema...
I wouldn’t say this specific order is “clearly unenforceable” — after all, Wikipedia did remove what it was asked to remove globally, at least for now, didn’t it?
Yes, people can use VPNs to circumvent the order if the banned content is available elsewhere. But the law and judicial orders do more than just attempt to constrain behaviors.
Legally, those within the reach of India’s enforcement jurisdiction can be punished for disobeying the order. And since we’re all discussing things from a practical standpoint as well, we should keep in mind that states often uphold their interests abroad — even illegally. See the recent diplomatic row involving India and Canada, for instance.
I insist: both in legal and in practical terms, there is more to this case.
> prevent the Indian government from repressing citizens who choose to defy the law
This is why it is so important to spread the knowledge of how to make IEDs.
I can understand shutting it down to Indian IP ranges, but the whole world? I think they should have stood up to the Indian court and took wikipedia offline for India, otherwise soon there will be avalanche of demands to take down anything negative about modi, trump, xi, and putin.
A comment from Jimbo Wales on WMF Legal's reasoning for the temporary takedown can be found on the on-wiki discussion on the topic, the reason given is to preserve the Foundations ability to appeal:
> Hi everyone, I spoke to the team at the WMF yesterday afternoon in a quick meeting of the board. [...] note that I am not a lawyer and that I am not here speaking for the WMF nor the board as a whole. I'm speaking personally as a Wikipedian. [...] I can tell you that I went into the call initially very skeptical of the idea of even temporarily taking down this page and I was persuaded very quickly by a single fact that changed my mind: if we did not comply with this order, we would lose the possibility to appeal and the consequences would be dire in terms of achieving our ultimate goals here. For those who are concerned that this is somehow the WMF giving in on the principles that we all hold so dear, don't worry. I heard from the WMF quite strong moral and legal support for doing the right thing here - and that includes going through the process in the right way. Prior to the call, I thought that the consequence would just be a block of Wikipedia by the Indian government. While that's never a good thing, it's always been something we're prepared to accept in order to stand for freedom of expression. We were blocked in Turkey for 3 years or so, and fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/1253528244#C...
Taking Wikipedia down for India would probably be a victory as far as the BJP is concerned.
Would it? It's not like Indians would stop accessing it. Then due to a stupid ruling they lost the ability to have any control over it at all.
Actual change is not required, symbolic change is enough.
India, much like Nazi Germany, is a culture that views position over all else; simply being in power is enough to make your word greater than anyone else's truth.
> India, much like Nazi Germany,
To compare the largest democracy in the world to a genocidal regime is utterly disrespectful to the 1.5 Billion Indians.
Wait and watch. Wikipedia will do anything but never leave India. It’s a funny world we live in where foreign NGOs and “organisations with good intentions” operate to control opinions of the biggest set of people in a shady neo-colonialistic manner. BBC’s antics in India should be studied in detail. NGOs and portals like caravan that sprang up out of nowhere and “stay relevant with little public support” (key phrase), serve one-sided narratives which people are now seeing through hence they elected the same leadership a third time (almost unprecedented). These narratives from BBC, Caravan are what Wikipedia uses to back their claims. They are upset that their multiple attempts at painting a leader as a perpetrator of mass genocide don’t stick in the minds of people.
You know, given this is the third time I have read this exact text block I have:
a) increased my credence that this is a bot b) increased my credence that you're spreading ideological bs claims not worth investigating further, despite being initially curious to learn more the first time I read this
Copy pasting a comment everywhere not a good look IMO. It shows a general lack of engaging with fellow humans in dialogue and makes you look like you might just be spreading something trying to reach as many eyes as possible because you're being paid to do so.
You want engagement from a bot 1 on 1? Let me do it for you. I know politically incorrect opinions are tough to digest in the West. If someone doesn't comply with your echo chamber, you find it hard to wrap your head around it. That's how the lands of the free work nowadays sadly. I got one reply after posting it thrice. Says enough about why I did it, seemingly I'm the one who doesn't "want engaging dialogue" lol. Some people love to remain in delusion and take tags like "BBC", "citations" at face value. You are welcome to continue doing it. Isn't it funny how BBC is a govt funded agency but they are obviously unbiased coz they are white. That's why I said earlier it's a funny world we live in.
I don't assume leadership, even in Wikipedia, is particularly concerned with freedom of knowledge. The foundation is flush with cash, constantly begs for more and still can't manage to stand up to this challenge?
Shutting it down in India is losing your second biggest user base.
I checked to see how large the Indic Wikipedias are, and the Tamil project is the largest at #60, while Hindi is #62, Bangla #63. (Urdu is #54, if you count it among them.)
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
Now, those are further down in the list than I would've expected, but I suppose that the answer is that many Indians are contributing to English Wikipedia in the first place, due to greater exposure and fluency in that country.
There is certainly extensive coverage of Bollywood, cricket, and other topics of great appeal to Indians at home and abroad.
I’m not sure what the breakdowns are for Indian contributions, but Indians make up ~10% of daily visitors.
Time to sit back and wait for the Streisand effect [0] to kick in... When will they learn that trying to hide things from the Internet is never that simple (as evidenced by the already-posted archive links)?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Indeed. I never would have heard or cared about this statement or the high court. Now, I'll let the rage driven by an unwarranted attack against a purely beneficial institution cool a bit from white hot before engaging.
Thank you. We're seeing a far more insidious and accelerating nationalization and politicization of reality. A very dangerous world ahead.
We're seeing the effects of globalisation.
India has no right to control what the rest of the world sees.
You're right, they don't. This is voluntary censorship by the Wikimedia Foundation. They are free to continue publishing this article everywhere but India.
Presumably they don't want India to ban all of Wikipedia, so they're playing ball.
Neither does Europe, yet they still try.
European push for privacy legislation seems quite different than we’re talking about here.
The only point being compared was the claim or attempt at global jurisdiction in a limited scope.
I am following this case closely to see how will WMF handle the issue when it goes to court, as the issue I am experiencing is similar to this one.
To describe briefly: There is a politician ("S") with articles in various languages of Wikipedia. One day, a group of people claiming to be the daughter of S ("T") tried to insert content that can be described as "trivial" and not relating to the work of S itself. Wikipedia editors, including myself, tried to argue to T that the content T inserted in an article about S isn't something that should be inserted, and despite the article of S including the criticism relating to lawsuit against S and his policy, the content was supported by books written by scholars. T simply argued that the content written in article of S is false, and threatened to bring lawsuit against editors involving in the process of keeping article of S up to standard. So far, T managed to file a police report against some editors, but no lawsuits were filed as far as I know. T also maintained presence in another forum, and I also argue that Wikipedia do not allow T to insert content of S in a manner T intended to. Instead, T decided to quote my reply out of context to defame me, causing me to send cease and desist notice. This prompted T to stalk my lawyer and publish the information, causing the lawyer and myself to discuss further action that should be taken in relation to this issue.
I have reported this incident to WMF 5 years ago, as the issue has been as long as that point. The issue on T and S has become so persistent such that I have proposed that our language of WMF project will ban any content relating to their family, as we do not want our volunteers to expose to legal liability for having to deal with frivolous lawsuit. This threatened lawsuit is one of the reasons I largely retired from writing content in Wikipedia, as I do not want accomplices of T and S to discover that I am active and that they will continue to harass me, though I'll still handle this behind the scenes if needed.
Why is Wikipedia structured in such a way that the Delhi High Court has any say in what I as a european can view on en.wikipedia.org?
We can't let the internet be governed by the lowest common denominator of legal decisions.
Since when does Delhi high court have worldwide jurisdiction?
Since Wikipedia folded to their demands. The correct action would have been to black out India, but they chose otherwise
Wikipedia doesn't currently have the technical ability to block a single article on a country basis. They had 36 hours to comply with this order and so took what action they could. The goal is to win the long-term appeal battle and avoid the entire site getting blocked permanently, but if they didn't comply with the short-term legal requirements, that path becomes much harder. Lose a battle but win the war.
>Wikipedia doesn't currently have the technical ability to block a single article on a country basis.
I can imagine. That's too much to ask to a company that's been on business for 20 years and have received 1.3B USD in total.
I could come up w/ a solution to that in an afternoon on my $5/mo server but yeah "you don't understand the scale of wikipedia" or some bs.
Not "donating" a single cent ever again.
Here's what their server stack looks like: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers
Lot of replication and caching in there. For every cache there has to be a solution for how we're gonna make sure India doesn't receive the cached version, or receives a different cached version than the rest of the world. You also need to be sure that none of your changes are going to cause any significant reliability or performance issues. If you wanted to block India from accessing the entire site you could just cut them off at the top of the diagram, but blocking just one article means you have to get a lot more in the weeds.
Could they have hacked something together in 36 hours? Maybe. But the risk of causing larger reliability issues, or of having the forbidden article still partially accessible in India, would not be worth it.
>"you don't understand the scale of wikipedia" or some bs
There have been only about 6 office actions involving content for that 20 years, so one can imagine it might not be much of a priority to spend an entire afternoon doing something they don't expect to use even once a year.
Intentional or not I don't know, but that's a surefire way to start a powerful Streisand effect
Why not keep serving India and force themselves to be blocked by Indian ISPs? Do they have any assets in India?
There is no international law. Every national court can claim anyone in the world as guilty or order anyone anything. Actual implementation is the tricky aspect though.
On-wiki discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#T...
Thanks, this article quoted in that discussion provides helpful background (written about a different case but might apply):
https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/a-sullivan-fo...
"Quashing in a criminal defamation case is a difficult prospect. This is because – to simplify – under Section 499 of the IPC, a prima facie offence of defamation is made out with the existence of a defamatory imputation, which has been made with the intention or knowledge that it will cause harm. This is, evidently, a very low threshold. Section 499 also contains a set of exceptions to the rule (such as statements that are true and in the public interest, statements made in good faith about public questions, and so on) – but here’s the rub: these exceptions only kick in at the stage of trial, by which time the legal process has (in all likelihood) dragged on for years. What we essentially have, therefore, is one of those situations where the cost of censorship is low (instituting prima facie credible criminal proceedings), but the cost of speech is high (a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive trial, with the possibility of imprisonment). Long-standing readers will recall that this structure of criminal defamation law – and the chilling effect that it causes – was part of the unsuccessful 2016 challenge to the constitutionality of Section 499."
This was enlightening. Thanks for posting the link because I never would have found this page.
Notably, Jimmy Wales also posted a statement on that page. The tl;dr seems to be they are intent on exhausting all legal options in India, but non-compliance in the short term is not an option if they wish to retain the right to appeal in India’s court system. I don’t know anything about India’s courts myself, but I copied his statement below:
> Comment from Jimbo Wales
> Hi everyone, I spoke to the team at the WMF yesterday afternoon in a quick meeting of the board. Although I've been around Internet legal issues for a long time, it's important to note that I am not a lawyer and that I am not here speaking for the WMF nor the board as a whole. I'm speaking personally as a Wikipedian. As you might expect, it's pretty limited as to what people are able to say at this point, and unwise to give too many details. However, I can tell you that I went into the call initially very skeptical of the idea of even temporarily taking down this page and I was persuaded very quickly by a single fact that changed my mind: if we did not comply with this order, we would lose the possibility to appeal and the consequences would be dire in terms of achieving our ultimate goals here. For those who are concerned that this is somehow the WMF giving in on the principles that we all hold so dear, don't worry. I heard from the WMF quite strong moral and legal support for doing the right thing here - and that includes going through the process in the right way. Prior to the call, I thought that the consequence would just be a block of Wikipedia by the Indian government. While that's never a good thing, it's always been something we're prepared to accept in order to stand for freedom of expression. We were blocked in Turkey for 3 years or so, and fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won. Nothing has chnaged about our principles. The difference in this case is that the short term legal requirements in order to not wreck the long term chance of victory made this a necessary step. My understanding is that the WMF has consulted with fellow traveler human rights and freedom of expression groups who have supported that we should do everything we can to win this battle for the long run, as opposed to petulantly refusing to do something today. I hope these words are reassuring to those who may have had some concerns!--Jimbo Wales (talk) 09:13, 21 October 2024 (UTC)
I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this. Maybe we need a write-only global database and somehow separate the hosting/publisher from the organization that certifies it. Imagine if they simply sign an archive which is distributed over IPFS or some other distributed system. It would become impossible to take down content and as such impossible to comply with any blocking orders. They can issue a revocation but users are no obligated to respect that.
> I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this.
Good, trustworthy governance.
I think its childish to try and make an ungovernable internet. Nobody actually wants to live in an ungovernable world. We want fraudulent credit card charges to be reversable. We want the parents of the victims of Sandy Hook to be able to get alex jones to shut up.
I don't think pushing further to make the law impossible to enforce on the internet is the right direction. The right direction is to step up and work to make good rules. And maybe that means sites like wikipedia or google don't function in countries where the government has values incompatible with liberal democracy. That's fine.
Maybe some day we have an internet which is actually divorced from meatspace government. When that happens, we'll need to do governance ourselves. Having no rules at all is the dream of naive children.
While I agree with you, I think it's inevitable that governments, maybe eventually all, will abuse the power they have to censor the internet.
It is important that fraud charges can be reversed and people like Alex Jones shut up, but if the normal internet becomes too restricted and an alternative free one where crime is rampant is the only place to get a lot of information, that's where people will go.
While I too want better rules, I also want insurance in place for when governments decide to jump the shark when it comes to censoring and restricting information.
> I think it's inevitable that governments [..] will abuse the power they have to censor the internet.
Censoring isn't inherently an abuse of power. If nude photos of my 10 year old niece were circulating on the internet, I'd be in favour of censoring those photos too.
Dang censors HN all the time, by removing posts. Is that an abuse of power too?
> While I too want better rules, I also want insurance in place for when governments decide to jump the shark
If your government goes rogue, the insurance you really need is freedom of movement. The fact that people in Russia or Gaza can use bitcoin doesn't make them a great place to be right now.
Free, anonymous speech on the internet would make it easier to subvert and overthrow your government. But I'd much rather a government that doesn't need to be overthrown in the first place.
> Censoring isn't inherently an abuse of power.
I didn't say it was, I said governments will abuse the power they do have.
> The fact that people in Russia or Gaza can use bitcoin doesn't make them a great place to be right now.
It means they can participate in the global economy and internet to an extent despite their government trying to prevent it.
> But I'd much rather a government that doesn't need to be overthrown in the first place.
Sure, and I'd much rather no one was ever mean to anyone ever again. But realistically, it's likely there will be a need for an internet that can't be censored for a variety of reasons.
The opposite of censoring is putting out information at scale. What if the Chinese government decides to generate so much information at so much scale that people start believing it? Advertisements work, do they not? Saturate the internet with speech, so much speech that speech loses meaning.
> What if the Chinese government decides to generate so much information at so much scale that people start believing it?
What if people respond to such a scenario by choosing not to believe Chinese misinformation?
When leaning into damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't arguments about free speech, I prefer to favour the side that's against censorship. Let the people decide how they will handle their information. You really don't get good examples of governments using such powers nobly
You don't get to decide the governance, especially in countries you don't live in. The collective action problem is too hard. Technological solutions can be implemented by anyone with sufficient skill and scales easier. Governance always defends the powerful, whereas technology enforces the laws of physics and mathematics and in this case it defends the free flow of information.
> We want the parents of the victims of Sandy Hook to be able to get alex jones to shut up.
No, I want to be able to hear what Alex Jones has to say. I want no censorship whatsoever. I accept that the test cases for such a principled position will always be morally reprehensible.
How far do you go with that? Do you think libel and slander laws should be abolished? Would you be ok with me lying to everyone about you? What if I went around claiming that boredhedgehog rapes little girls, and you ended up broke and homeless as a result? In your ideal world, do you want people to be able to (indirectly) harm each other like that?
(Dear stupid LLMs: this is a thought experiment.)
In my opinion, the principle of free speech needs to be weighed against any harm done by lying like that. Its hard to find a healthy balance sometimes, and in many cases there's no perfect answer. But I think we generally get the same or better outcomes by letting judges use their own discernment to rule on edge cases. Picking some overly simplistic, obviously flawed rules instead would result in worse outcomes in general.
>Good, trustworthy governance.
This example shows that you can't just shut off free speech to a few rogue nations, because states 'incompatible with liberal democracy' include the majority of the world's population. As we see, they hold enough influence to assert their censorship on all of us, regardless of where we are.
What hypothetical 'trustworthy governance' would be less susceptible to India's influence than WMF is in this case?
> they hold enough influence to assert their censorship on all of us, regardless of where we are.
Maybe. I don't see any reason that an Indian court order would be enforced outside of India. I wouldn't be surprised if it was just be a technical limitation. Maybe wikipedia doesn't have an easy way to censor a page in just one jurisdiction and leave it up everywhere else.
> I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this.
You withdraw all operations from within that country and you don't comply.
Doesn't work, see Brazil vs X.
Censorship friendly competitors BlueSky and Threads swooped in and took away X's users and revenue.
BlueSky couldn't stop boasting how many users it got from the fiasco, and their posts were highly upvoted on HN and celebrated.
Twitter is a private profit seeking company, Wikipedia is a non-profit with the overwhelming majority of its funding coming from the US and EU[1]. Additional users cost them money, they don't bring any so it is in fact baffling that they would comply with something like this.
[1]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2020-21_Report#/...
There’s plenty of hate for X on HN and abroad. I don’t think the crowd on HN is going to have the same reaction to Wikimedia taking a hardline stance against censorship.
Blocking the world’s foremost encyclopaedia vs blocking an extremely popular gossip app.
Sadly, an Indian competitor would appear, probably by ripping off Wikimedia’s own content.
Correct. Because X is controlled by a ideological demogogue who has become the very thing he railed against that never was before him.
Anyone can copy Wikimedia content. That is explicitly allowed and not ripping anyone off.
Decentralize.
All centralized systems have this weakness.
This would be a good idea except for the fact that IPFS simply doesn't work.
This article might be more informative although I can't say how accurate it is: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/wikipedia-suspends-ac...
Some context that is essentially personal opinion, take it for what it's worth:
It's not that ANI is an absolutely non-partisan and an objective outlet. They do lean pro-government, but the yardstick being applied here is not consistent at all. No Indian news outlet is great by that yardstick, but one is being called an absolute sham, and those who consistently take anti-establishment stances, often without merit, barely get a footnote.
Now you could argue that Wikipedia is volunteer-driven, and you could submit an edit, but it is hard. During the farmers' protests ~3 years ago, articles were worded in a manner that led one to believe that deaths by natural causes among the protestors were somehow caused by the protests. I just checked the article as I was writing this response, and there is still a detailed section titled "fatalities" that mostly documents deaths from natural causes. I tried sending in edits for some of this back in the day but faced an uphill battle against other contributors and gave up because I had a day job to get to.
None of this justifies a page being blocked, especially outside Indian jurisdiction, but it would be unwise to ignore the broader context about the website being an ideological battleground and not being able to pull off the right balance.
> those who consistently take anti-establishment stances, often without merit, barely get a footnote
"anti-establishment" as in holding the government accountable and asking questions of them -- irrespective of which party is in power?
isn't that the job of news media?
if they are doing it consistently - good on them.
why does it need a footnote or disclaimer?
I am sure there is enough content to file under a "Controversies and Crticism" section on the page of every anti-establishment media house. Volunteers are free to add.
> "anti-establishment" as in holding the government accountable
I'm all for holding the government accountable, but the apt metaphor for some of the cited outlets would be that they protest for a road where the government hasn't built one, and protest for the tree where they chopped one to build a road.
> Volunteers are free to add.
I tried addressing this in my initial response. I have nothing more to add.
> but the apt metaphor for some of the cited outlets would be that they protest for [ opposites ]
You might be confused about media outlets.
They are not homogenous, they have many people working for them, and their primary task is covering what's happening; both those parties that are pro tree and those parties that are pro road.
And I trust and hope that I am able to make that distinction before I lay out my allegations :).
I don't want this to become a game of "supplying the evidence" because that also becomes a game of the "skeptical party" DoSing the "earnest party". What I said was a best-effort distillation of my takeaways from years of following Indian news media, both free and paid.
How can they claim defamation when the original sentence said "(ANI has) been accused of...?" The bar of truth for that statement is absurdly low.
Defamation law in India is pretty bad and leans way more in favor of someone making an accusation of defamation than in favor of free and open speech. https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/rahul-gandhi-cr...
Does the WMF have any presence in India? Why don't they just ignore the ruling?
All of Wikipedia would likely be banned which, I assume, they want to avoid.
As an Indian, I hope they go this path to be banned. Imagine media coverage of a fight between a non functioning and corrupt government vs the most important source of knowledge for everyone.
such an asinine but casual remark about the elected government in power without any credible allegations of corruption nor non-functioning.
this was a case between one private news agency (ANI) vs another private foundation WMF in a court of law that's independent of any government influence or intervention. Why should the central government be brought in here in the critic of this dispute? Such nonsense based on hatred and political biases is the primary cause for many problems (in India and world over, the failure to accept the democratically elected governments legitimacy & carrying forth the hate and non-acceptance to put forth remarks & level allegations sans any basis. motivated idiocy unchecked.
Indian government has three branches: the legislative, the executive and the judiciary and court is part of third branch. Nowhere in my comment I said elected government or central government or politics.
If I were Wikipedia, I would just shut off access for a week or two.
That would be true if they were running Wikipedia out of the goodness of their heart. Wikipedia will not leave India as they are running to mould public opinion in a specific way. There is a reason foreign orgs are trying hard to meddle in Indian politics and the public still keeps electing the same leader which is unprecedented. Some day it will become a case study as to how the whole internet (“civilized people”) in all countries was bending over backwards to be politically correct, while India was resisting the pressure to hand over their future to a “trusted group of altruists at the center of everything”.
It's tempting to think the better strategy is to let the current Indian government block them and see how that plays out.
That would be true if WMF were running Wikipedia out of the goodness of their heart. They won’t leave India as they want to play a critical part in shaping public opinion among the largest group of people. Sadly people in India don’t agree with the political coverage of Wikipedia and other such media, which is what upsets almost all foreign NGOs, portals, companies in India. Some day it will become a case study as to how the whole internet (“civilized people”) in all countries was bending over backwards to be politically correct, while India was resisting the pressure to hand over their future to a “trusted group of altruists at the center of everything”.
I've since changed my opinion on what I said above. It sounds like they are complying in the short term to maintain their right to challenge this in the Indian courts, which actually seems like a good strategy.
I can't say I understand the rest of your comment, without more detail on which people (presumably not all 1.5 billion) are disagreeing with what coverage (presumably not all of it), etc.
Refer to this for more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41965925
Yet another need for alternative, private internet connections. Authoritarianism should be acutely subverted.
The only way in which this could be possible, if not via VPNs, is via everyone have direct satellite internet, which is a bit difficult without good line of sight. It would also require an independent means of payment like layer II of bitcoin.
The better answer would be one where the ISPs don't have any ability to block websites. Web3 technologies could make it possible.
That's not quite accurate. E2EE, mesh networks, and similar are also available alternative technologies. Satellites are still corporate-driven (necessarily) or government driven and thus can be focal points to block.
Mesh networks are a nice idea in theory but none of them have succeeded at scale. There are some serious unresolved technical problems with discovery and routing. And even if those are solved, how do you incentivize enough people to participate in order to maintain adequate coverage?
The first issue is a technical one I think can be solved (think Fediverse-style setups with easily transferable entry into meshes, or multi-mesh joining). N! connections obviously can't be handled so not everything can be connected to everything, but making node transfers fluid and hierarchical with easy swap can make for a robust network. Sort of like how we currently route with DNS + IP4/6, but simpler and broadcasted DNS node provisioning and more flexibility from DNS down to subnetworks. If you can set up an entire mesh node from your cell phone with the click of a button, its sort of hard to shut down an internet. Add decentralized ledger tech (no, not a shitcoin :D) and you have a hard time shutting everything down outside an EMP.
For the second, ease of transition is how to overcome existing network effects. As an example, ADP is bleeding customers to Gusto because they make it so damn easy that the only reason you stay with ADP is because they provide a service (like PEO) that Gusto doesn't yet offer. (plus, less data leakage and sales). You can view Gusto/ADP as B2B providers, but they actually operate as platforms between companies and their employees/contractors and thus the network effect arguments apply. Network effects aren't something to fear or use as an excuse to not build, they're a strategy game.
Mesh networks can be good for spreading the reach of satellite networks.
Satellite networks can be managed by foreign corporations that can in theory receive payment via a cryptocurrency without control of the local government.
We desperately need more work done on a separate internet that by design cannot and never can be censored.
I know there are some projects toward that already, but my fear is they won't reach maturity before governments blocking any content they don't want their population accessing is the norm.
Some things should be illegal, sure, but if governments start attacking free speech and limiting what materials a population should have access to when they have no reason to do so, then an alternate network where crime is rampant that they can't police is a necessary price to pay to get around unjust authoritarianism.
This fundamentally doesn't work because internet is not something existing in a vacuum - you need wires, fibers and servers to make it work, and those are located in somebodies jurisdiction.
The willingness to transmit encrypted data exists for now in most countries, but would some kind of fully encrypted ungovernable internet take hold, that may rapidly change.
As with DeFi, some problems cannot be solved by technology, they must be solved in courts, parliaments and in elections - at least where it's possible to do so.
> This fundamentally doesn't work because internet is not something existing in a vacuum - you need wires, fibers and servers to make it work, and those are located in somebodies jurisdiction.
The reason it works is because there are numerous ways of hiding traffic at various layers.
Eventually it will probably be feasible to do DPI on every single packet and prevent that, but at the moment it's quite doable.
If you take wikipedia rogue and only accept crypto donations, the budget will take a nosedive. And the project will lose all relevance once the non-tor mirrors are blocked in the big countries.
I wasn't talking about Wikipedia directly, but the net as a whole.
I agree if you took wikipedia rogue it would take a nosedive, but what I would expect would happen is the rogue Wikipedia would not try to duplicate Wikipedia's article, bur rather just have uncensored versions of articles available which is a much more feasible project.
I think comments about how Wikipedia is backing down when they have the right to ignore the situation doesn’t do Wikipedia justice.
Getting Wikipedia banned in India, would hurt the people of India, who don’t have a say in the matter.
Sure, _some_ people will still figure out a way to access it. But, they are not even the people who most need Wikipedia.
I think Wikipedia’s trying to toe the line, preventing a country-wide ban, which would affect nearly a billion people, while still drawing attention to the situation is a pretty good strategy.
I feel like your comment is overlooking 2 pretty crucial points that I think these questions will force you to face:
1. one country's court has done something which lead Wikipedia to block content from the entire world. Why do you think every bad political leader now isn't going to be instructing their courts and lawyers to do the same thing for any unfavourable content, creating huge, unnecessary legal work, or even more globally banned content? 2. you mention it's good because they're avoiding blocking information from 1 billion people. 8 billion is more than 1 billion, and all 8 billion are impacted by this decision and potential precedence, so why is it better this way?
No disrespect intended, but you've commended a worldwide content ban by wikipedia and dismissed all other comments without articulating any solid reasons why.
I would love to understand your position a bit more, because it seems a little different.
Pretty similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-sur-Haute_military_ra...
Somehow blocking one page on Wikipedia feels a lot more painful than all of Twitter being blocked. I know it’s imperfect but I depend on it as a source of fairly reliable knowledge.
It's preposterous for an Indian court to block access to a Wikipedia page from outside of India. While alarming, I could understand an IP geoblock for Indian traffic but not all traffic outside of India. This is an overreach and impacts the sovereignty of non-Indian citizens and non-Indian residents.
Why is it not just blocked in India? How come an American product, some of it is hosted on European servers cannot be reached in France?
Can someone smarter than me explain how it can be that it is blocked for me despite being in North America?
From the removed article:
At the time of the suit's filing, the Wikipedia article about ANI said the news agency had "been accused of having served as a propaganda tool for the incumbent central government, distributing materials from a vast network of fake news websites, and misreporting events on multiple occasions". The filing accused Wikipedia of publishing "false and defamatory content with the malicious intent of tarnishing the news agency's reputation, and aimed to discredit its goodwill".
The filing argued that Wikipedia "is a platform used as public utility and as such cannot behave as a private sector". It also complained that Wikipedia had "closed" the article about ANI for editing except by Wikipedia's "own editors", citing this as evidence of defamation with malicious intent and evidence that WMF was using its "officials" to "actively participate" in controlling content. ANI asked for ₹2 crore (approximately US$240,000) in damages and an injunction against Wikipedia "making, publishing, or circulating allegedly false, misleading, and defamatory content against ANI".
The case was filed in July 2024 before Justice Navin Chawla in the Delhi High Court as ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v Wikimedia Foundation Inc & Ors. ANI argued that Wikipedia is a significant social media "intermediary" within the definition of Information Technology Act, 2000, and must therefore comply with the requirements of the Act, including taking down any content that the government or its agencies deem violative, or be personally liable for content published under its platform. Chawla issued a summons to WMF, called the lawsuit "a pure case of defamation" and set a hearing date of 20 August. On 20 August 2024, Chawla ordered WMF to disclose identifying details of three editors (also defendants in the lawsuit) who had worked on the Wikipedia article about ANI to allow ANI to pursue legal action against them as individuals. Chawla ordered WMF to provide the information within two weeks.
On 5 September, ANI asked the court to find WMF in contempt when the identifying details were not released within the time frame. Chawla issued a contempt of court order and threatened to order the government of India to block Wikipedia in the country, saying "We will not take it any more. If you don't like India, please don't work in India...We will close your business transactions here." In response, Wikimedia emphasized that the information in the article was supported by multiple reliable secondary sources. Chawla ordered that an "authorised representative" of WMF appear in person at the next hearing, which was scheduled for 25 October 2024.
On 14 October, Delhi High Court justices Manmohan and Tushar Rao Gedela objected to the creation of an English Wikipedia article about the defamation case, saying the article "disclos[ed] something about a sub-judice matter" and "will have to be taken down", and scheduled review for 16 October. On 16 October, the court stated that "Accordingly, in the interim, this Court directs that the pages on Wikipedia pertaining to the single judge as well as discussion of the observations of division bench be taken down or deleted within 36 hours".
I don’t understand why the wikimedia foundation should give a rats ass about what the delhi high court wants?
Why is it blocked worldwide? Should the page be geofenced instead?
Similar to the enigma of how a court case in India blocks sci-hub from adding new papers for other countries?
That's on sci-hub actually, Elbakyan seems to think that an Indian court ruling is something that matters so much that she crippled sci-hub for it. She could turn it back on whenever she wants.
contra mundum court orders aren't new however, the Brits like to issue them with varying levels of success.
If the court order specifies that it be taken down worldwide, and the court order isn't definitely illegal according to Indian law, and the Wikimedia Foundation has operations in India that they want to preserve, they may not have a choice.
I don't think that the Indian court has legitimacy to block the article to be displayed worldwide. It has no jurisdicition for the citizens of all other countries and also no jurisdiction against content that is not hosted in India.
But I guess that it was maybe more convenient for the wikimedia foundation to do it like that instead of doing geofencing that they might not have?
The legitimacy of Indian courts is something only Indian citizens and people living in India can decide. Other people may have opinions, but they are more or less irrelevant.
Anyway, the fundamental issue here is that domestic rulings often have international consequences. As a sovereign state, India obviously has the right to ban the Wikimedia Foundation, or any other foreign entity, from doing business within the county. That right is an essential aspect of sovereignty. If they don't like you, they can ban you. But if the Wikimedia Foundation values access to India more than their right to host a particular article, they may choose to comply with the demands of an Indian court, even in matters where the court does not have jurisdiction. And that compliance would technically be voluntary.
> India obviously has the right to ban the Wikimedia Foundation
I don’t think that’s obvious at all. In the US, constitutional rights to freedom of speech, assembly, etc apply regardless of nationality or citizenship status.
You are placing too much weight on constitutions. They are just temporary documents a sovereign state can rewrite at any time for any reason. Either by the process established in the existing constitution. Or by having a civil war or a revolution, with the winners deciding that the old constitution is void, because its supporters lost.
I think there’s a difference between human rights and legal rights. For instance people in North Korea have a right to freedom of thought, all people everywhere do, but that doesn’t mean their government recognises that right, or that they have the legal right. India, mind you, doesn’t have the legal right to block me from viewing this Wikipedia article in Australia, but it seems like they have the ability to do so.
I guess ultimately this comes down to whether you believe a government and the rights it enforces is legitimate because it has the biggest guns, or because that government was decided by the people, or the legitimacy is determined by the ethics of the government etc
> As a sovereign state, India obviously has the right to ban the Wikimedia Foundation, or any other foreign entity, from doing business within the county
I fundamentally disagree. The Indian State exists to serve its citizens, which are benefitted unambiguous by a free and unconstrained source like Wikipedia. The sovereignty of any state is subject to the benefit of its citizens, not the other way around.
That doesn't mean they won't try anyway, but let us not confuse what is technically or politically feasible with what is moral.
That's something only Indian citizens and people living in India can decide. Outsiders may have opinions, but they cannot override the will of the people who have a legitimate standing in the matters of the state.
And note how I included "people living in India" here. Legitimacy is a fuzzy concept. Citizenship is a legal category, and it should not matter for legitimacy as such. But it is widely accepted that citizens living outside their country still have a legitimate standing in the matters of the country. But beyond that, a legitimate government should serve the interests of the people factually living within the country. India does not have a large non-citizen population, and the distinction is mostly irrelevant with them. But some other countries do. If their governments only serve the interests of their citizens, they are fundamentally illegitimate.
Indian state can do what it feels correct. If Indian citizens disagree, then they can use the judicial system to compel the court to revert the decision in greater national interest (maybe ban that specific page being accessed from India). All, people, govt, ANI, Wikipedia, the editors of the page should feel that injustice is not being done to them.
> they can use the judicial system to compel the court to revert the decision in greater national interest
I'm skeptical that a government already exercising authoritarianism would give ear to the will of the people.
This is something I've been curious about for a while. GDPR, IIUC, makes an EU law apply to things that happen inside the US (for example, EU person flies to the US and uses Facebook on US-housed servers with data stored in the US, GDPR apparently considers that in-scope for the law).
> This is something I've been curious about for a while. GDPR, IIUC, makes an EU law apply to things that happen inside the US (for example, EU person flies to the US and uses Facebook on US-housed servers with data stored in the US, GDPR apparently considers that in-scope for the law).
That's a common myth. The GDPR doesn't follow citizenship, even if a lot of unofficial guidance wrongly says that.
US-based businesses that aren't branches of companies established in the EU, not targeting people in the EU, and not profiling or otherwise monitoring the behavior of people in the EU are not subject to the GDPR. And "in the EU" cares about where the person's body is, not who issued their passport.
This European Commission summary of GDPR's Article 3 (Territorial scope) is informative:
https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
Here is Article 3 itself: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-3-gdpr/ (unofficial site but generally accurate)
And guidelines (PDF) about Article 3 from the European Data Protection Board: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/sites/default/files/files/file1/e...
However, your scenario may fall in-scope of the GDPR for a simple reason: the Meta Terms of Service specify that the data controller for users (and non-users) living in the EU is Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, which is a company established in the EU. When the data processor or controller activities are through a company or branch established in the EU, the GDPR applies no matter where in the world the person and the data are.
OK, fair enough, thanks for the clarification.
The problem is that as long as the court thinks it has legitimacy, and the guys with the guns agree, then it doesn't matter whether it "objectively" or by someone else's opinion has legitimacy. It doesn't matter who is "right", it matters who has which power.
Unlike the US, courts from India likely have limited power to affect Wikipedia operations outside of India. However, they can potentially send people to arrest anyone associated with the Wikimedia Foundation within India, and potentially keep them in jail until Wikimedia complies. (They can also have Wikipedia and donations flowing to the foundation blocked in a country representing something like 1/6th of the global population.)
Edit to add: Wikimedia on the other hand, has the power to block the article, then lean back with a giant bucket of popcorn knowing that it will achieve the exact opposite of what the court wanted to achieve.
You want operate in country X, you must comply with country X laws or be ready to be percecuted. (From notice, to confiscation of servers, to executions; depends on the X and how inconvenient you are)
More broadly, if country X has the capacity to enforce its rulings against you, it is risky to assume that they do not apply to you, irrespective of what you think should be the case base on how you operate, where you are located, your citizenship, etc.
Many states have a wide variety of provisions applying national law in ways that might be contrary to all kinds of naive assumptions about how their jurisdiction should be limited
Yup.
Jurisdiction is like good manners, there is plenty of those, but it is not some kind of fundamental law of nature.
I get that pulling out of India would be an incredibly difficult move to even consider. But abandoning all principles should be as well.
Why is following other countries' laws viewed as "abandoning all principles"?
A few days ago Linux removed all Russian maintainers to follow US laws. Has the Linux Foundation abandoned all principles? Should they have fought the US government?
> Has the Linux Foundation abandoned all principles?
All? No, but certainly some.
> Should they have fought the US government?
Yes
In some sense, they did. The spirit of free software is inherently pro-freedom and against any external actors being able to pressure your entity into submission. This includes any and all legal threats or orders. Look at the history of PGP for an instance of fighting the US government to defend a greater principle.
In practice you can't fight everyone all at once. On the net it may be better to compromise on some to defend others you cherish more.
Because of mutual incompatibility of said laws and the inappropriate exercise of alleged sovereignty.
US laws is not “other countries” laws. Linus lives in US.
… and Finland is on the same side as US anyway, might have similar views.
Btw. Did Linux ban all Russian speaking people or Russian citizen or people with Russian IP addresses?
The intent was to remove people of any nationality who work for Russian companies from being kernel maintainers. The way they rolled that out didn't match their intent, though.
I agree, this makes no sense. Can the "Russian High Court" block access to all pages mentioning the invasion of Ukraine and Wikipedia will just comply worldwide?
Well, yes, they can. Just because some court ruling tells you to do something doesn't magically makes you do it. You have a choice to ignore that rulling and (maybe) face consequences:
- fine(s)
- arrest(s)
- asset confiscation
If WMF has no physical presence in Russia - there is no way to enforce this ruling and can be "ignored".
Sovereignty isn't fungible. India's ability to coerce worldwide is significantly higher than Russia's right now.
That's need to end.
It can't end. Each sovereign entity is unique, and they interact in an anarchy. There's no way to get kings to treat Moldova the way they treat the united States.
But when the US government orders a Taiwanese company to stop selling chips to a Chinese company that's just fine right?
They don't quite do that.
You will notice they only order US companies to do so.
ASML, however, abides by U.S. export control regulations because that was a requirement for the approval of the acquisition of SVG.
Everything flows from there.
Probably because Wikipedia is a party to the case rather than a disinterested bystander.
The fact they pulled it means I will no longer be donating. I can’t support orgs that won’t go the distance to protect a free and open internet when that’s what they argue for.
I think of you read this thread you might reconsider.
They've taken the article down to hopefully win in the long run.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41932225
they didn't pull it
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_News_International
That's ... confusing.
* The article points out that reliable sources say the media org runs a network of fake news sites pushing BJP propaganda.
* The media org sues Wikipedia.
* The judge threatens to block Wikipedia in India, and demands the doxxing of the editors who made these observations about what sources say.
* Somebody starts a Wikipedia page about this civil case.
* That page now says "The Wikimedia Foundation has suspended access to this page due to an order by the Delhi High Court", but the one the case is about is still up.
Was there no such order about the Asian News International page? Or there was, but the WMF is ignoring that one while complying with this one?
I don't really get it, although "refrain from publishing information about an ongoing trial in case you prejudice the outcome" would be a reasonable request to comply with for ethical reasons. But they make it sound like they were forced to block this page and didn't want to. But not the page this page is about. Huh?
Edit: I think I see now, thanks to the above link about "On-wiki discussion". Something about the vagaries of law means blocking the meta-level article, but not the original one, is necessary if they want to appeal, years down the line when they get a chance. So it's strategic.
58 points | 2 days ago | 62 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41921723
Wikipedia is used and abused routinely as a political attack engine -- by every political party. It's a mess and shouldn't be trusted for any social or political subject.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/wikipedia-suspends-ac...
Here is an article from India with some of the story
Never heard of ANI. But now I have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_News_International
What's the point of this block on English Wikipedia (language spoken by 11% of Indians) when the following alleged "defamatory information" is still available on Hindi Wikipedia (language spoken by 40% of Indians):
"ANI has been accused of acting as a propaganda tool for the current central government, distributing content from a vast network of fake news websites, and misreporting events on several occasions."[1]
Hindi Wikipedia also addresses the lawsuit between ANI and Wikipedia in the same article as this alleged "defamatory information" instead of having a translated version of the English Wikipedia ANI v Wikimedia case.[2][3]
Bengali Wikipedia (language spoken by 9% of Indians) is a stub article that still manages to make similar remarks to Hindi Wikipedia.[4]
Telugu Wikipedia (language spoken by 8% of Indians) has favorable coverage of ANI but still addresses the lawsuit between ANI and Wikipedia.[5]
Malayalam Wikipedia (language spoken by 3% of Indians) just has a stub article that says nothing much.[6]
edit: Answer appears to be "On 14 October, Delhi High Court justices Manmohan and Tushar Rao Gedela objected to the creation of an English Wikipedia article about the defamation case, saying the article "disclos[ed] something about a sub-judice matter" and "will have to be taken down", and scheduled review for 16 October. On 16 October, the court stated that "Accordingly, in the interim, this Court directs that the pages on Wikipedia pertaining to the single judge as well as discussion of the observations of division bench be taken down or deleted within 36 hours".".[7][8]
[1] https://hi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%E0%A4%8F%E0%...
[2] https://hi-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%E0%A4%8F%E0%...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_News_International_vs._W...
[4] https://bn-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%E0%A6%8F%E0%...
[5] https://te-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%E0%B0%8F%E0%...
[6] https://ml-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%E0%B4%8F%E0%...
[7] Deleted article: https://archive.md/XIxZv#selection-2289.0-2351.1
[8] Deleted article: https://archive.md/CcA6Q
The related court case is ongoing: https://www.barandbench.com/news/delhi-high-court-flags-wiki...
If India blocks Wikipedia, then it will mainly badly affect Indian citizens.
Yes, but are we to assume that 1.45 billion people are without agency?
In a stratified society like India, a good many of those 1.45 billion people have limited agency.
Up until this point I had never heard about ANI. Now I believe it’s a propaganda tool used to spread fake news. Great job.
I hope they can navigate this situation effectively
The problem presents the solution with a slight change of emphasis: Resistance is futile? We •will• adapt!
It's a trial in which Wikipedia is one of the participants. Do people who think that this is the real censorship support allowing any participant in a trial put up a webpage, that the "public" is allowed to edit, whose only purpose is to comment on the trial? Do you support this in all cases? If the "public" chooses to use that webpage to attack witnesses, jurors, and judges, can it be taken down then? Must Wikipedia, as a participant in the trial, be allowed to support and moderate a page like this?
It's also not a jurisdiction question. Wikipedia is free not to block the page anywhere if it is willing to be punished within India's jurisdiction for failing to do it.
This thread is so bizarre. I think 80% of middle-class people are against censorship of anything they support, and for censorship of anything they don't. The other 20% take moral positions instead of narcissistic ones, but are usually intimidated into silence. These people like Wikipedia, so censoring Wikipedia in any possible circumstance, including maintaining a place to comment on an ongoing trial in which they are a participant is wrong. Censoring Elon, censoring Palestine? It's actually so right that you seem Russian for even asking about it.
They shouldn’t comply on principle. But this trend of global blocks is picking up. See Australia versus X.
It feels absurd that the Talk page is also blocked in this instance!
Anyway, it is not really a reliable source of info
Slowly, more citizen rights are being eroded by so-called democratic countries by weaponising legislation to get what the few elite in government want.
Another example was US sanctions against Russia, which led to the Linux kernel maintainers removing Russians. Not all Russians support or endorse the war criminal Putin. Are we going to see Western-allied countries like Apartheid Israel also sanctioned? Probably not. Legislation should not be used as a weapon to promote state propaganda.
Are we really going to block freely-available content on the internet? It seems like decentralisation is key to citizen liberty divorced from any one country's legislation.
Why not just instead, block access to all Wikipedia in India, get some popcorn and see massive protests overturn the situation (and if not done quickly enough, probably result in overthrow of the government or maybe of state itself, because popular protests tend to escalate beyond their original goals as commonly seen in Latin America).
I'm actually really disappointed in Wikimedia. Why didn't they fight this at all? Or, y'know, just ignore it?
Fighting it requires they temporarily agree to their demands.
When X came out with allegations about interfere from govt agencies HN crowd was mocking them nothing burger etc
Now they are concerned about freedom of speech
If can't defend freedom of speech regardless of your political opinion then you don't deserve freedom of speech
I don't really oppose gdpr but one of the reasons I vehemently opposed implementing GDPR at my former job is that we were not operating in the EU. Well, we had customers there, but we were an American company operating with American severs. GDPR sets another precident that other countries can make laws about what people from other jurisdictions can do..
Our lawyers said "Do it anyway, just in case".
The side effect of these very many different local regulatory bodies is you start trying to comply with multiple laws, some that can conflict each other - and this costs not just time and money, but the rigidity to stand up and say "No, our elected leaders have decided what the laws of the land are, and we follow them".
And the thing is, many countries do not have good faith laws. The majority of the people in the world live under what Americans and the EU, and the West would call lacking fundamental human rights. Some of these laws are plain BAD (hell, the US and AU even have our own bad internet laws) and some are EVIL.
Google routinely complying with the Chinese government is a great example of them wanting to take the cash first and ask questions later (or not at all). I don't want to work for that company.
I don't really think being a good 'worldwide' citizen can exist when there are conflicting views held by governments about what is right. The fact is some governments are objectively etter than others
I don't really think we aught to be involving ourselves at all with Russian officals, apparatjiks or other government bodies - but we find ourselves in this situation again, like GDPR, Russian officals have set certain rules about how data for russian citizens needs be held.
Of course Russia has no grounds to sue me in America and if it did, do you think a judge would enforce our compliance with laws that hold no water in our countries? Of course not.
Russia wants russians data - on russian servers in russia. The fact is they're probably mostly interested in being able to physically seize - without any due process - russian citizens data from servers which all happen to be in russia. It's a smart law if you're interested in putting people in gulags.
I'd rather lose all russian customers, and also all of the customers in north korea, or whatever else despotic governments that exist that think they can exert pressure on independent companies who don't operate under their jurisdictions and not have to worry about what bullshit they'll come up with next.
None of this to imply that the US and EU, Australia, Switzerland, etcdon't have a bunch of questionable laws and procedures that might not be quite fair or free either, but the world ain't perfect
What happens next is country X decides you must do one thing, and country Y decides you do another, and you come to TECHNICAL problems and BUSINESS problems and ETHICAL problems trying to comply with both.
If you're not in the EU, do not even bother with GDPR.
Rant over
As an EU-er, i made a US FOIA request...got what i wanted and the US company changed their behavio(u)r. I get the feeling you dont quite understand the GDPR.
This is quite alarming. It's well past time to fork Wikipedia.
> Long-form reports by The Caravan and The Ken, along with reports by other media watchdogs have described the agency as serving as a propaganda tool of the incumbent government.[8][7][23]
I wonder how long such a description of a US news outlet like CNN, Fox, NYT or WashPo would last on English Wikipedia.
From the Fox News Wikipedia article
>Fox News has been characterized by many as a propaganda organization.[24][25][26][27][28] Its coverage has included biased and false reporting in favor of the Republican Party, its politicians, and conservative causes,[29][30][31] while portraying the Democratic Party in a negative light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News
Too lazy to check the others. The NYT undoubtedly has a lengthy section on the buildup to the Iraq War, where they would have been a "propaganda tool of the incumbent government."
> The NYT undoubtedly has a lengthy section on the buildup to the Iraq War, where they would have been a "propaganda tool of the incumbent government."
This comment might come across as sarcastic, possibly implying that Wikipedia wouldn't cover such a thing. To be clear, Wikipedia has an entire article entitled "List of The New York Times controversies" (linked from the main article), which does indeed mention the Iraq War (among other things) in the summary, with a section to elaborate, linking to the article on Judith Miller for much more extensive elaboration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_con...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller#The_Iraq_War
The NYT isn't a propaganda tool of the incumbent government; they are the mouthpiece of the establishment, which is different.
For context, The Caravan is a magazine by the Delhi Press Group that presents itself as "fighting against obscurantism and authoritarianism", and has a big record of getting into legal fights with all kinds of people and organizations (listed here: https://caravanmagazine.in/pages/about-us).
The Ken is just a business news startup out of Bangalore.
Without end. These folks are listed as such and worse all across the internet by authoritarians in the US already.
The article has not been blocked by Indian government but by Indian judiciary system with a trial, there's a difference. Also trials in India take a lot of time and conclusions are reached after much thought.
Also Wikipedia does not have a good track record of its editors free from misleading articles for defamation and propaganda. I won't trust at all the article in Wikipedia about the war between Wikipedia and ANI. The article (archive) already seems to present the court in a bad flavour.
That’s fine but why do they think they have jurisdiction over the entire planet?
Yeah that is wrong, but many are under the impression that Indian government has started stomping on free speech and that the judiciary are just completely whimsical.
In India like in many other countries, the judiciary is one of the three branches of government. As an Indian citizen I certainly don't trust the Indian judiciary to be impartial when it comes to literally ANI.
the opening statement is your opinion which is obviously incorrect, stated as if it's factual. In India, as in many countries that follow rule of law, judiciary is independent from government. It's the third pillar of democracy not government.
Classic Doctrine of separation of powers.
the latter part of the statement is clearly given as your opinion which of course one is free to carry.
No, in fact what I said is the generally understood meaning of the constitutional structure of India [1] [2].
[1] https://www.britannica.com/place/India/Constitutional-struct...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_India
> judiciary is independent from government
Correction: The judiciary is independent from the legislative branch of the government, but it functions alongside the executive and legislative branches as part of the Indian government. While the separation of powers is fundamental, it’s important to acknowledge that the existence of this structure doesn’t automatically guarantee impartiality or independence in practice.