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Democrats want a truce with Section 230 supporters:
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says apps and websites aren't legally liable for third-party content, has inspired a lot of overheated rhetoric in Congress. Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have successfully framed the rule as a "gift to Big Tech" that enables social media censorship. While Democrats have very different critiques, some have embraced a similar fire-and-brimstone tone with the bipartisan EARN IT Act. But a Senate subcommittee tried to reset that narrative today with a hearing for the Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency (PACT) Act, a similarly bipartisan attempt at a more nuanced Section 230 amendment. While the hearing didn't address all of the PACT Act's very real flaws, it presented the bill as an option for Section 230 defenders who still want a say in potential reforms.
[...] Still, Section 230 has been at the forefront of US politics for years, and some kind of change looks increasingly likely. If that's true, then particularly after today's hearing, a revised version of the PACT Act looks like the clearest existing option to preserve important parts of the law without dismissing calls for reform. And hashing out those specifics may prove more important than focusing on the policy's most hyperbolic critics.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:59PM (1 child)
Censorship can only be defeated by technical means. It is a total waste to discuss the law
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @01:04AM
This used to be the case, though I'm not sure if it scales as it once did. There has always been an edge to network differential of available compute, with the edge holding WAY more processing power.
So really all that was ever needed to ensure free communication, was a mechanism where the collective CPU utilization of the speakers was higher in the aggregate than the censoring institutions could muster indevidually. IOW you don't technically have to encrypt well, you just have to encrypt poorly on a universal basis. You don't even need secure keys. The added CPU cycles is what creates the higher cost. You just have to make censorship more expensive than freedom.
In the 1990's this was kind of how it was even on the clear net. Just switching frames was so expensive that doing line rate traffic inspection was unfathomable for carriers. They figured this out, which is why they have "personal assistants" now. Essentially YOU pay the compute that is used to spy on you at the edge, and that takes away the advantage of actually owning more processing power than they do.
This is changing somewhat as the current generation is being raised on retard-tolerant hardware. The demands on computer literacy are lower in this generation than they were before. Consumer hardware is getting less efficient at the same price point now. Or so it seems. That and the aggregation of content under so few vendors has made the process of isolating particular users much easier. And the hardware is so consumer-fucking in architecture, that it is virtually impossible to get past it. You practically have to burn your own asic now to get hardware that doesn't have built in surveillance features.
I spec'd a protocol that leveraged the edge/net compute differential many moons ago. Never showed it to anyone. The infosec community would go: "that isn't connonical ISO-whatever-the-fuck, and it pisses in my ricebowl", and everybody else doesn't give a shit. It was an interesting exercise. To loosely quote some dude on the TOR project: "If god didn't want us to have secure communications, he wouldn't have invented large prime numbers."
So yeah. It CAN be done. And in truth it wouldn't even be that expensive. But sure as shit the guys holding themselves out as saviors of the Internet while they quitely jerk off carriers with the other hand (Mozilla) aren't going to do it. Nore are the "we are creating the next gen secure network (until we get bought by the same assholes we claim to hate)" lojacking backdooring motherfuckers like telegram.
So it is what it is. And I write this on a machine that I'm sure is infested with commercial, (and probably some not so commercial) spyware, on a site that I know is harvested for profiling.
It is a statistical certainty, that if you shit on enough people eventually you are going to run into somebody you aught not have fucked with. Here's to whomever that happens to be, when the existing civil rights debate comes to an end.