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Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Posted Mar 4, 2019 18:50 UTC (Mon) by Deleted user 129183 (guest, #129183)
Parent article: Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Since I cannot comment on Rosenzweig’s website (like everywhere in 2019…), I’ll comment here:

> In the decentralised dream, every user hosts their own server. Every toddler and grandmother is required to become their own system administrator. This dream is an accessibility nightmare, for if advanced technical skills are the price to privacy, all but the technocratic elite are walled off from freedom.

Not only an accessibility nightmare, but also a monetary nightmare. Not everybody can afford their own server, domain, et cetera. Actual money can be also price for privacy, and that means that all but economical elite are walled off from freedom.

The compromise – hosting a system for oneself and for one’s friends – doesn’t help much. I’m actually in charge of a small Internet community (kinda relevantly, democratic – I was elected to the position), and we would really want to self-host our mailing list – but we can’t really do it, all we can afford is a shared server that makes setting it all up practically impossible. So we use an external centralised mailing list service for lack of the better options.


to post comments

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Posted Mar 4, 2019 23:58 UTC (Mon) by deiter (guest, #130779) [Link] (54 responses)

The latest mobile phones are far faster than email servers were two decades ago, and are able to run HTML servers (if you don't believe me, download the VLC app). Cloud VPSes can cost less than $25 a year. Domains cost $10, but free dynamic dns services mean if you're okay with something a bit off-brand, you can afford it.

Most people would have trouble using a package manager, but in terms of affording a "server, domain, et cetera", all of those cost less than a cell phone and plan.

>So we use an external centralised mailing list service for lack of the better options.

Are you sure you need a mailing list? Many web forums allow one to subscribe to a topic.

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Posted Mar 5, 2019 8:31 UTC (Tue) by osma (subscriber, #6912) [Link] (13 responses)

I think it's a mistake to focus on the monetary cost of hosting your own services. If you pick cheap options it's not that much, as pointed out above.

With e-mail, the main problem I see is spam. Hosting your own mail server pretty soon becomes a daunting task of keeping out all the junk. Yes there are tools like SpamAssassin that can help - when configured well, which requires a lot of studying and experimentation to get right, and the situation keeps evolving so you have to keep maintaining it to stay on top of the situation.

With web servers the situation is similar: it's pretty easy to follow tutorials to set up a LAMP stack and for example WordPress, but then you have to keep defending your installation from intruders, comment spammers and the like.

It can be a fun challenge for a while if you have the right mindset but eventually it gets tedious. With hosted services run by big companies, they do all the housekeeping for you, but usually they also ask for either your money or your privacy (or both) in return.

(I've run a public mail server and an increasing number of public-facing web servers since around 2000)

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Posted Mar 5, 2019 10:41 UTC (Tue) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

If you use a static site generator and don't support comments, or outsource comment features, then running your own site is pretty low-effort. I help run a small church Web site and it's not much work (and we even use a Joomla monstrosity instead of a static site generator which would make much more sense).

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Posted Mar 5, 2019 11:56 UTC (Tue) by ale2018 (guest, #128727) [Link] (2 responses)

> I think it's a mistake to focus on the monetary cost of hosting your own services. If you pick cheap options it's not that much, as pointed out above.

I'd rather pay for my own disks than keep my mail in the cloud. I don't see the privacy guarantees of the latter. As a matter of facts, the majority of servers encrypt mail in transit, but a very meager subset of users applies end-to-end encryption. So, knowing who can read your disk makes a difference.

IME, most of the effort and cost of maintaining a mail server is related to the connection; for example, an HDSL line with fixed addresses registered at RIPE along with your own abuse contact. Most ISPs in my country unfairly require a VAT number for a fixed address, and no-one registers an abuse address for you.

> With e-mail, the main problem I see is spam. Hosting your own mail server pretty soon becomes a daunting task of keeping out all the junk.

The "economies of scale" in this case allow a server to classify senders. No email message arrives at Google's servers from an unknown sender. On the opposite, my tiny server meets ~40 new domains every day. I use lists, such as Spamhaus and DNSWL, which is still a kind of centralization.

The spam problem is physiologic. Lots of money revolves around advertising. And many people still consider the merchant-customer relationship akin to the predator-prey one. The challenge, and the dream, is to change their mind.

> they also ask for either your money or your privacy (or both) in return.

Exactly!

'killers' he called them on his 15 season NBC show

Posted Mar 5, 2019 22:21 UTC (Tue) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (1 responses)

"And many people still consider the merchant-customer relationship akin to the predator-prey one. The challenge, and the dream, is to change their mind."

Or we can try to change yours. I'm sure Google and Microsoft before them would be happier if consumers knew their place and stopped complaining to their representatives urging regulation of 'predatory' business practices.

Perhaps Snowden ushered in a pendulum swing, but prior to 2013 I certainly felt that not enough people recognized the predator-prey nature of their relationships to technology and multibillion dollar international tech companies. I don't think that pendulum has swung too far yet. That's one hell of a capitalist predator we have in the oval office these days...

LOVINT...

'killers' he called them on his 15 season NBC show

Posted Mar 18, 2019 14:59 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I think ale2018's complaint may have been that the *businesspeople* too frequently consider their relationship with their customers to be a predator's with its prey, rather than, perhaps, trying to make money by doing things that would help their customers. Parasitism is a common lifestyle, but it's not one that anyone other than the parasites much likes.

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Posted Mar 5, 2019 13:03 UTC (Tue) by ms (subscriber, #41272) [Link] (1 responses)

> With e-mail, the main problem I see is spam

The main problem I see is that "residental" IPs are all on black lists. Most large email providers will not accept SMTP connections from such blacklisted IPs. I've not tested to see if that's any different if you set up SPF/DKIM and friends, but I wouldn't expect it to work. It's a walled garden world.

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Posted Mar 5, 2019 17:46 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

Exactly. This is the other side of it being hard for a residential user to keep the spam out because they can't recognize all the spam generating servers. Big companies like Google can't either, but they can get away with ignoring all the small servers and leave the problems this creates for others to deal with.

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Posted Mar 5, 2019 17:02 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (5 responses)

On the other hand, the social costs of running your own infrastructure are based on how the system works. There may not currently be a system that avoids those costs, but if the monetary costs are minimal, it's worth trying to design a federated system to minimize the social costs, since people would be able to run it if you succeed.

the internet versus the price of ink by the barrel

Posted Mar 5, 2019 20:17 UTC (Tue) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (4 responses)

indeed, platforms and fields of dreams (to reference a theme from my college networking textbook). The problem I've been harping on is that with the ToS 'conspiracy' most people aren't able to run anything characterizable as a 'server' on their common lowest-cost-tier internet service (with a clear conscience of not knowingly violating the contractual terms of service they 'voluntarily' agreed to when choosing to do business with one of their many wonderful capitalistic choices of ISP, har har)

the internet versus the price of ink by the barrel

Posted Mar 5, 2019 21:04 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (3 responses)

True, but the federated system might be no more or less of a server than a web browser pointed at gmail is (when your gmail account receives a message, traffic goes to your browser), or an IoT light switch (user interaction initiated over the internet causes a device that was doing nothing to do something). There are various clever tricks for forming a session between two endpoints that are both clients for ToS purposes, and I don't see any reason these couldn't be used for federated messaging.

You might end up with a system where some participants do session negotiation work in addition to transmitting messages that involve them, but that doesn't have to matter from a user perspective.

the internet versus the price of ink by the barrel

Posted Mar 6, 2019 1:53 UTC (Wed) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (2 responses)

all correct(*), but the larger problem I see lies in the fact that if you want to be a home server software developer with traditional financial security earned via your tradecraft, you don't want to sell/ship any kind of product that makes you legally liable for inducing others to violate legitimate business contracts they had entered into voluntarily. And more importantly, and bank financing you, or investors legally doing due diligence, may have similar misgivings. Thus impacting the overall state of the art/industry

Which just means that I think there would be a world of difference in the state of the art (today, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years from now...) if the FCC had specified that server prohibition ToS is a functionally and legally equivalent form of the net neutrality violation of blocking based on application, service, or device type. I suspect most in this audience can see the functional equivalence (in the case of people who choose to read and obey that extremely small fraction of the very wordy contractual terms of service). However most of the general public may not understand that. Generational effects may change that however.

(*) it does matter _a little_ for the user perspective, in a sense. The hope might be that it matters so little for long enough that other factors eventually obviate it and make it a moot point.

the internet versus the price of ink by the barrel

Posted Mar 6, 2019 5:56 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> Which just means that I think there would be a world of difference in the state of the art (today, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years from now...) if the FCC had specified that server prohibition ToS is a functionally and legally equivalent form of the net neutrality violation of blocking based on application, service, or device type.
Yes. As we know the US is the only country on Earth and FCC is The Supreme Authority that forces everybody to bend their knee before the Inviolable Omnipotent FCC Rules.

Other countries have many ISPs that can't care less about running home servers. Situation is not different at all there - the reason why home servers are not used is not a legal regulation or a contractual claus, it's the inefficiency and cost of doing it.

the internet versus the price of ink by the barrel

Posted Mar 7, 2019 16:57 UTC (Thu) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link]

Yes. As we know the US is the only country on Earth and FCC is The Supreme Authority that forces everybody to bend their knee before the Inviolable Omnipotent FCC Rules.
You are wrong, there is this country called China. They had this thing in the news in and around Tienanmen Square three decades ago. You might try looking it up on google. But the answer you get might depend on whether you are in china. It's a big picture. An issue of importance worthy of more respect than you are giving it. But, trolls gonna troll.

Seriously though- to any Chinese children or adults reading this- Do not listen to my advice, it may be harmful for your health. More or less harm than the daily air pollution you face, I couldn't say with certainty, and wouldn't hazard a guess. And certainly wouldn't hazard taking the word of my local newspaper's journalists on the matter. Not that the wiser among us blindly take the word of our local journalists on this side of the pond either.

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Posted Mar 6, 2019 0:39 UTC (Wed) by 0A (guest, #126874) [Link]

There are different costs in play there.

If you just want an email server where you can receive any email from other people, without $COMPANY technically having access to them, or 'deciding' which mails are worth appearing into your inbox or not, it is relatively easy.

However, if you also want not to receive _certain_ emails, that is a different, and harder, problem. We enter into the realm of deciding which emails you _want_ and which not. And yes, the algorithms used by Gmail would probably be better than a bare SpamAssessin/rspamd, if anything for the amount of email that they can peek into in order to detect mass-campaigns. However, they too have false positives, and sometimes mark legitimate messages as spam. So if you delegate into their antispam for organising your inbox, you also have to bear their failures (of course, you can't "just" import their antispam without also using other pieces).

Depending on your email flow, that may not be such a problem. You may eg. prefer to review manually every received email, and create -if needed- local rules on your MUA. Or go the opposite way and only let direct access to your inbox from a few whitelisted domains/users.

In fact, for the scenario by Polynka of a small community, it should be easy to use a mailing list that needs approval and where only subscribers can send.

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Posted Mar 5, 2019 9:17 UTC (Tue) by grawity (subscriber, #80596) [Link] (39 responses)

> Cloud VPSes can cost less than $25 a year

Under the assumption that you have the technical means to pay for it. I got my first email account when I was 11, but I couldn't get a bank card capable of making online payments until 18.

(Not that VPSes were anywhere as common or as cheap at that time, either...)

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Posted Mar 5, 2019 19:46 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (38 responses)

If you want to run a server then you need Internet connectivity, a computer to run it and money to pay for electricity for its upkeep.

free as in water

Posted Mar 5, 2019 20:23 UTC (Tue) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (35 responses)

and in the modern age, all of those things ought to be as accessible to the penniless as a glass of water, daily bread, a cot, and some kind of reasonable shelter. Giving people access to Free Speech on the Global Information Superhighway is not more expensive to society than providing a free glass of tap water at any restaurant. I.e. a razpi, the electricity to run it, and the added cost to the local cable modem utility corporation are as justifiable in the modern age as the cost of all those free glasses of water.

free as in water

Posted Mar 5, 2019 20:43 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (34 responses)

The cost of one RPi would be enough to run a small VPS for a year. It will get even worse once cloud ARM64 servers become more prevalent.

apples and oranges

Posted Mar 5, 2019 21:09 UTC (Tue) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (33 responses)

A server in the hand is better than a flock of them in a cloud owned and operated by someone else for their profit instead of yours.

apples and oranges

Posted Mar 5, 2019 21:20 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (31 responses)

Why is it better? I don't generate my own electricity, grow my food, purify my water or mine oil and distill gasoline. Why is server hosting any different?

censorship

Posted Mar 5, 2019 22:28 UTC (Tue) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (26 responses)

fewer third parties that get veto power over your Free Speech.

Again, the important thing isn't that everyone is saying things that require them to have extreme lack of communication channel censors. The important thing is that everyone *COULD IF THEY WANTED TO*. It may just be my USA democracy/freespeech propaganda upbringing talking here, but I think it's critically important to the health of democracy to hold a hard-line on free speech issues. And messily complicated as it is to draw the whole of modern internet technology into the equation, I think it's necessary to do so. And from my understanding of things, the ability to host your own server facilitating such minimization of external censorship opportunities, is a necessary part of that equation.

censorship

Posted Mar 5, 2019 23:28 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (25 responses)

> fewer third parties that get veto power over your Free Speech.
TLDR; version - it'll be slightly less convenient to spew neo-Nazi or far-right propaganda.

When somebody starts moaning about the freedom of speech it's always that.

naked troll alert

Posted Mar 6, 2019 0:34 UTC (Wed) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (3 responses)

> fewer third parties that get veto power over your Free Speech.
TLDR; version - it'll be slightly less convenient to spew neo-Nazi or far-right propaganda.

When somebody starts moaning about the freedom of speech it's always that.
It is certainly true that Free Speech, and Freedom more generally are often used in the service of double plus ungoodness. Such is the price we all pay to enjoy their benefits. But I'll take that tradeoff any day of my life.

naked troll alert

Posted Mar 6, 2019 5:49 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

And so how home servers are going to help the Freedom of Speech?

read the plentiful lines

Posted Mar 7, 2019 3:08 UTC (Thu) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link]

see my other comments

naked troll alert

Posted Mar 6, 2019 16:28 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> But I'll take that tradeoff any day of my life.

That's your choice, but you don't have the *right* to *force* that trade-off on to me.

"fast, cheap, good. Pick any two ..." There's a whole bunch of things people desire that fall in to this category - choosing one inevitably means you lose another. Just because YOU value freedom of speech above other things, doesn't mean I do.

And, quite frankly, it seems to me all too often that "freedom of speech" is equivalent to "forcing your views down my throat". The American constitutional right "to pursue happiness" all too often means *REDUCING* the total happiness (happiness is not zero-sum...). There's plenty more I could come up with if I thought about it ... :-)

A lot of non-USians see the US as a greedy self-centred bully, and that sort of attitude re-inforces that view. Yes we may not have been any better in our heyday, but I hope some of us have learnt. I'm not sure, though, given the Little England mentality of "let's put the 'Great' back in to Great Britain".

Cheers,
Wol

censorship

Posted Mar 6, 2019 16:15 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

TLDR; version - it'll be slightly less convenient to spew neo-Nazi or far-right propaganda.

When somebody starts moaning about the freedom of speech it's always that.

That's totally unfair. Sometimes when they moan about freedom of speech it's about attempts to block spam, false advertising, and other forms of commercial fraud.

censorship

Posted Mar 7, 2019 18:43 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

Ha! You pampered, spoiled first-worlders...

Down here in our small corner of Latin America, some of us still value free speech because some of us have seen (as recently as the 1980s and 1990s) our relatives being tortured and killed for investigating government corruption...

Cría cuervos, e te bicarán los ojos...

censorship

Posted Mar 8, 2019 1:33 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (15 responses)

My friends in Nicaragua beg to differ. They live in a civil war and they would very much like to have the freedom of speech that you write about so derogatory.

Many years ago, I had acquaintances in China who ended up in prison because they exercised their ideal of "freedom of speech". I think they see it different than you, too.

Please note: Neither the USA nor other 1st world countries are the whole world.

Cheers,
Joachim

PS: I'm from a country where neo-Nazi propaganda is illegal even on your own server, and I think that's OK. We learned the hard way that there are limits to freedom of speech *because* it is so valuable.

censorship

Posted Mar 8, 2019 1:39 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (14 responses)

> My friends in Nicaragua beg to differ. They live in a civil war and they would very much like to have the freedom of speech that you write about so derogatory.
And how a box at home will help it? It's even worse - your home box can easily be confiscated.

Sidenote, in Russia cloud services advertised that they are police-proof. It's very typical for corrupt local government to confiscate physical servers as a "material evidence" in a drummed-up criminal case. Even if there's no crime committed and the company is cleared in the court, its work can be paralyzed for months.

And on a bigger note, if your government has no freedom of speech then work to fix THAT problem.

censorship

Posted Mar 8, 2019 1:56 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (13 responses)

> > My friends in Nicaragua beg to differ. They live in a civil war and they would very much like to have the freedom of speech that you write about so derogatory.
> And how a box at home will help it?

This is not about running services *at home* but about running services *under one's control*.
Don't move the goal posts.

> And on a bigger note, if your government has no freedom of speech then work to fix THAT problem.

Two days ago, I received the notice that the brother of one of my friends in Nicaragua was killed by government forces. Thanks a lot, but I see in real life what it means "to fix THAT problem" and I don't need your complacant comment about that -- and, btw, independently operated communication services help with the fight for fixing, even if you don't recognize that.

censorship

Posted Mar 8, 2019 1:58 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (12 responses)

> This is not about running services *at home* but about running services *under one's control*.
> Don't move the goal posts.
I'm not moving ANYTHING. The whole thread is "running services AT HOME". With the impediment being an FCC rule somewhere.

Don't move your excuses.

> Two days ago, I received the notice that the brother of one of my friends in Nicaragua was killed by government forces. Thanks a lot, but I see in real life what it means "to fix THAT problem" and I don't need your complacant comment about that -- and, btw, independently operated communication services help with the fight for fixing, even if you don't recognize that.
No it's not. It's at best a distraction. At worst it's a diversion.

censorship

Posted Mar 8, 2019 2:35 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (1 responses)

> > This is not about running services *at home* but about running services *under one's control*.
> > Don't move the goal posts.
> I'm not moving ANYTHING. The whole thread is "running services AT HOME".

This thread started with

> A server in the hand is better than a flock of them in a cloud owned and operated by someone else for their profit instead of yours.

I.e., this is about not running servers *in a cloud owned and operated by someone else for their profit*.

I read *in the hand* as *under one's control*, as cited above. Physical location in one's house (a.k.a "at home") doesn't matter. In fact, you're right that running a server at home is usually not desirable in repressive situations.

> Don't move your excuses.

I don't move my excuses. My reaction was to your comment where you wrote

> > fewer third parties that get veto power over your Free Speech.
> TLDR; version - it'll be slightly less convenient to spew neo-Nazi or far-right propaganda.
> When somebody starts moaning about the freedom of speech it's always that.

and equated "moaning about freedom of speech" with "spewing neo-Nazi propaganda". This bold equation was the one that I reacted to.

I'm from Germany, I live in Germany, and I have probably more experience fighting against with "Nazi propaganda" than you, being politically active here since 4 decades. Equating "Nazi propaganda" to "moaning about free speech" (your words!) is a disservice to the quest for an open and inclusive society.

> > Two days ago, I received the notice that the brother of one of my friends in Nicaragua was killed by government forces. Thanks a lot, but I see in real life what it means "to fix THAT problem" and I don't need your complacant comment about that -- and, btw, independently operated communication services help with the fight for fixing, even if you don't recognize that.
> No it's not. It's at best a distraction. At worst it's a diversion.

You changed context by deleting your snarky comment that this replied to. FTR:

> > And on a bigger note, if your government has no freedom of speech then work to fix THAT problem.

I.e., you cannot see the value of own-controlled communication services in a repressive society when one is on the opposition side.

Well, since that's the case: I retract my expressed opinion that you wrote a complacant comment. That is not a fitting term, and here's not the proper place to express what I think about this. It seems that we live in different worlds, and since that is the case, I'll stop participating in this thread.

censorship

Posted Mar 8, 2019 8:57 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> I.e., this is about not running servers *in a cloud owned and operated by someone else for their profit*.
Maybe not this branch of the thread, but its peer is about home servers explicitly.

> I'm from Germany, I live in Germany, and I have probably more experience fighting against with "Nazi propaganda" than you, being politically active here since 4 decades. Equating "Nazi propaganda" to "moaning about free speech" (your words!) is a disservice to the quest for an open and inclusive society.
In the US right now the "free speech advocates" almost invariably turn out to be Nazis/racists or crazies.

> I.e., you cannot see the value of own-controlled communication services in a repressive society when one is on the opposition side.
Nope. I saw that the value of self-controlled communication services is pretty much zero. GMail or Facebook turned out to be more helpful.

And if you want to compete about who lived through more civil disturbance then you'll probably lose.

network neutrality is related to the issues in this discussion

Posted Mar 8, 2019 2:45 UTC (Fri) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (9 responses)

> This is not about running services *at home* but about running services *under one's control*.
> Don't move the goal posts.
I'm not moving ANYTHING. The whole thread is "running services AT HOME". With the impediment being an FCC rule somewhere.

Don't move your excuses.
Cyberax is a troll or a bot or something and perhaps ought to know better. The two of us have gone over the issue in as much depth in multiple prior LWN comment threads. The FCC angle was something I added to the article's discussion comment thread. Cyberax steadfastly holds the position that my angle does not represent good thinking on the subject. I have come to the conclusion that Cyberax is a troll or has some personal stake that isn't clear to me yet explaining their opposition to my FCC issue.

While I mocked the mocking/hyberbolic reference to unrealistic dreams in the beginning of the article in another comment, it happens to be true that one of my longer term dreams is to see a better federated client/browser for these creativecommons lwn comments that facilitates tagging, tracking, and minimizing troll impact in the reading of these lwn discussions. Using a federated reputation system solving basically the same fundamental issue as brought up by spam-fighting in the federated email universe. We should have the freedom to architect our own 'echo chambers' :) (one of the first domains I registered was 'filteredperception.org'. Empowering people to more efficiently filter their own perception of the internet is worth doing I think)

You might just try ignoring Cyberax until then, or perhaps theorize the account holder has deployed an annoying chatbot. Whatever works...

network neutrality is related to the issues in this discussion

Posted Mar 8, 2019 2:52 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> Cyberax is a troll or a bot or something and perhaps ought to know better.
- I'm an FCC bot and I approve this message.

filtered/richlycontextualized perception

Posted Mar 8, 2019 4:06 UTC (Fri) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link]

[me]> Cyberax is a troll or a bot or something and perhaps ought to know better.
[Cyberax]- I'm an FCC bot and I approve this message.
On the subject of
one of my longer term dreams is to see a better federated client/browser for these creativecommons lwn comments that facilitates tagging, tracking, and minimizing troll impact in the reading of these lwn discussions. Using a federated reputation system solving basically the same fundamental issue as brought up by spam-fighting in the federated email universe.
A quick hack that comes to mind would be adding a link to every comment which goes to a page of links to prior comments of that commenter responding to the same individual. Or a generated list of search results based on a search of the commenter's past comments using the current comment as the search terms. Not quite a federated next generation slashdot frenemy reputation filtering, but perhaps facilitating easier gleaming of long term conversational insights.

network neutrality is related to the issues in this discussion

Posted Mar 8, 2019 15:25 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (6 responses)

> Cyberax is a troll or a bot or something and perhaps ought to know better. The two of us have gone over the issue in as much depth in multiple prior LWN comment threads. The FCC angle was something I added to the article's discussion comment thread.

I'd be careful there ... I've had my differences with Cyberax, but I see *you* as closer to a troll than him...

Remember my "cheap, fast, good" comment? Free speech is no use when you're dying from an easily-cured illness because you're too poor to afford the treatment. Value systems differ, and yours seems badly out-of-kilter with mine, and probably Cyberax's. Free Speech is worthless, if you lack the resources to make yourself heard.

Cheers,
Wol

our conversation ends at the point of implied threats to my Free Speech

Posted Mar 8, 2019 17:52 UTC (Fri) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (5 responses)

[Wol]: I've had my differences with Cyberax, but I see *you* as closer to a troll than him

[Also Wol elsewhere]: And, quite frankly, it seems to me all too often that "freedom of speech" is equivalent to "forcing your views down my throat".
I do remeber your words. I'm wise enough to know when to end a conversation permanently. Please refrain from replying directly to any comments of mine in the future, I will make the same effort.

A wise troll once said "The line between trollness and non-trollness is not a line drawn on a map or in the sand between people. It is a line drawn down the heart of each and every one of us."

our conversation ends at the point of implied threats to my Free Speech

Posted Mar 8, 2019 19:03 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

> I do remeber your words. I'm wise enough to know when to end a conversation permanently. Please refrain from replying directly to any comments of mine in the future, I will make the same effort.
Sounds especially ironic from a free-speech advocate.

magic words

Posted Mar 8, 2019 19:28 UTC (Fri) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (3 responses)

please cease and desist

magic words

Posted Mar 18, 2019 16:06 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

So... you think everyone should be free to respond to whatever comments they like and have unbridled free speech except when *you* disagree with them? You're even using inappropriate legal terminology ("cease and desist") to try to cast a pall of theoretical legalese over the thread-branch you dislike.

This seems like a rather inconsistent worldview (though a common one). Freedom, freedom for everyone who agrees with me! But everyone else can go hang.

magic words

Posted Mar 23, 2019 22:07 UTC (Sat) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (1 responses)

please don't overlook the subject

magic words

Posted Mar 27, 2019 15:15 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The subject? You're now doing this on every thread where people have the temerity to disagree with you. The subject appears to be 'all subjects'.

censorship

Posted Mar 8, 2019 22:31 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

Nice godwin. I'll be sure to remind you of it if I ever see you complaining that Recaptcha has unpersoned you from the bulk of the internet for not generating enough capital via free labour.

censorship

Posted Mar 9, 2019 1:07 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

??
What does reCaptcha has to do with right-wing whiners?

censorship

Posted Mar 22, 2019 7:44 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Don't act like one of those whiners. I was very obviously responding to a thread in which you vocally advocate for individuals relinquishing their ability to host content on the internet to cloud service gatekeepers. Have you never been slapped in the face by cloudflare telling you you're not human and demanding you submit proof to google before you're permitted to read J. Random's blog? Lucky you.

apples and oranges

Posted Mar 7, 2019 8:59 UTC (Thu) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link] (3 responses)

Cloud VPSs that are so cheap (at least in my experience) have a tendency to disappear abruptly when the company offering them closes, rebrands, etc.

Even in the lucky case that to migrate away is your own decision or that the VPS provider tells you with sufficient advance that they are shutting down your service, even on a fast internet connection moving away many tens GBs of email from the VPS can be painful and may lead you to exceed the allowed rate/month.

Furthermore, why saving your chats/posts/email at a cheap VPS provider should give you better privacy guarantees than doing it with google, amazon, facebook, etc.?

apples and oranges

Posted Mar 7, 2019 9:44 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> Cloud VPSs that are so cheap (at least in my experience) have a tendency to disappear abruptly when the company offering them closes, rebrands, etc.
So does your home server hard drive...

backup copies and choosing where to physically store important data

Posted Mar 7, 2019 17:20 UTC (Thu) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link]

offline and offsite backups matter. I'm not sure if that task can be simplified enough for toddlers and grandmothers to handle it, but maybe somebody will rise to that challenge someday.

apples and oranges

Posted Mar 11, 2019 10:49 UTC (Mon) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

I think this is why you need a 3rd party encrypted backup solution to go with the service you buy.

apples and oranges

Posted Mar 11, 2019 10:36 UTC (Mon) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

I think their is a huge difference between:

mom-and-pop hosting provider in the same city or regional large city of which you know where the datacenter is compared to storing your stuff with Microsoft or Google.

One thing that makes life a lot easier in that case is: same jurisdiction.

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Posted Mar 6, 2019 8:03 UTC (Wed) by gravious (guest, #7662) [Link] (1 responses)

For me the pain point are these:

(1) dynamic IP and dynamic DNS

(2) email servers are complex beasts compared to other types of servers

---

HTTPS used to be on the list but Letsencrypt solved that

---

I think probably everybody here has the internet at home, has a spare always-on box (be it a lowly rPi or a mighty Mac Pro), but getting a fixed IP address (how does one do that?) and managing your email locally and properly without going insane (how does one do that?).

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Posted Mar 6, 2019 14:13 UTC (Wed) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link]

Hurricane Electric runs a gratis DNS service with dynamic DNS capability. It's not perfect (in particular, they do not offer DNSSEC), but it may solve your first pain point. There's no helping the second pain point, unfortunately, but if it's any consolation Mastodon is even worse, I find. I have a mail server I've been running for five years now, and Mastodon sends me running for the hills. I still haven't worked up the courage to deal with all its dependencies.


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