Broken Internets. Photo by mediageek 2011.
During the whole anti-SOPA saga when geeks were screaming nonsensically about a law that in fact would have prevented show cases like those of Aaron Swartz or Kim Dotcom (if in fact that's what they were, and I'm not entirely convinced), they kept bleating about "breaking the Internet".
I found this the most utterly fake aspect of their hysterical crusade, and I kept asking about it. It just didn't sound right. I thought it was contrived. I understood enough of the mechanics of it to ask whether it wasn't just a really overheated edge-case. And hey, how is that DNSSEC coming along, guys? That new shiny that even Reddit had to criticize. You know, that we just couldn't sacrifice to SOPA! It has its boosters and its critics -- big companies aren't using it yet because it is hard, not clear if it is good, and other things still do the job. Here's a good round-up by [email protected] explaining what DNSSEC is; it isn't for dummies, but I think a lot of SL users could follow along. I found it helpful in explaining what DNSSEC will NOT do for you: not protect confidentiality, not protect you against a DDoS. Interesting!
So if we "couldn't" have the Internet be "broken" for the purposes of this new shiny (and expensive to implement) DNSSEC -- that is so wondrous the largest companies don't use it yet -- what's your real argument for the Internet being "broken"? I don't think you have one.
Orlowski at The Register had an excellent piece debunking this "breaking the Internet" claptrap philosophically, and pointed out that the entire privacy hysteria of the geeks is devoid of an understanding that they need private property to go with that -- and they've just spent a decade undermining private poperty with their copyleftism. This piece linked the notions of the absence of permissions on digital property with the absence of protections of privacy -- bingo.
Then there was Richard Bennett's piece, as an engineer, debunking all the hysteria, and calling out one of the signatories who had himself invented blocking software, so it was pretty hypocritical that he was now telling the government to remove it. This is the only piece I've found by an engineer outside the Silicon Valley/open source cult/EFF tank, and likely someone would denounce him for favouritism to telecoms because he debunks a lot of the hate around them, too, on his blog. It really is refreshing!
But let me tell you where I find the depths of hypocrisy on this "breaking the Internet" stuff and blocking links and "putting a chill on free speech" -- I mean aside from the mute, block, ban, expel, etc. that geeks often build into their systems. (Google never worries about "breaking the Internet" -- a hyperactive imaginary literary concept if there ever was one! -- when they "disappear" your post on G+ and tell you it "doesn't exist anymore" -- although of course it does -- merely because some thin-skin geeked blocked or muted you.)
But let me tell you where geeks block the hell out of the Internet, without any qualms, and don't ever think they are "breaking" anything.
And that's in their blocking of links to Russian sites that they believe are related to malware -- on a kind of blanket prejudice toward the country -- and possibly because bad governments report opposition websites as "malware sites" to get them out of search and out of the view and blacklisted That's something that has happened to me with this blog, too, even in America, necessitating me having to write some geeky gatekeepers to get unblocked as "malware" which of course I'm not, on a top commercial blogging site with no downloads or anything. It's just speech -- but speech they don't like.
I put out a weekly newsletter on Tajikistan. It always contains some "ru" links because people in Tajikistan tend to use the Ru domains as the government is always blocking them on tj.
With my first issue, the makers of TinyLetter, which is the free form of MailChimp I opted to use after using MailChimp at a few jobs, I was completely blocked and locked out of the entire service merely for a link to news.tj.ru, the top opposition/independent news service in Tajikistan. I routinely put these links on my Different Stans blog and nothing happens, Typepad doesn't block them or block my account or send me harsh messages. It links, and that's all there is to it.
I complained to TinyLetter, and after some days, finally my account was restored and my newsletter was unlocked and it was let through. Annoying because I had carefully transferred addresses and pictures there and such -- and I faced losing it all.
Then this last week, I tried issue No. 6, after about 4-5 issues went through without incident -- although they ended up in the spam file in Yahoo.
And the whole newsletter was held up and I was told that an administrator was reviewing my account.
So I complained, and got this message:
Thanks for writing in. Our review team was able to look over your
message here and that has been resent. Just to clarify a bit more, many
.ru domains are linked with malicious/spammy content so our automatic
filters are more sensitive to them by default. Unfortunately this means
that valid .ru domains can get rounded up as potentially dangerous to
our system as well, but we do have these measures in place in order to
protect our sending servers/delivery reputation.
Yeah, I get all that. The point is this: you set up automatic filters that likely include ANYTHING with "ru" in it -- and possibly things the authoritarian government has put out there if not EVERYTHING.
Russia, Tajikistan, and all the Russian-language former Soviet republics make up one-fifth of the earth's surface and together they are the second largeset "bloc" of population in the world after China. It's a HUGE Internet space. Of course, much of the world's hacking, viruses, spam, and malware comes from this spiteful territory, and a lot of it is government-incited.
But...there are things you can do, when you have someone who is a customer, and has contacted you live, and has a record (and a real name) -- even if that customer doesn't pay for your lovely service.
You can just block the link, and not the entire newsletter -- remember when the anti-SOPA gang screamed about how "entire sites" and "all of Facebook and Tumblr" would "go down" because of one pirate link? Nonsense. That doesn't happen. They don't work that way.
But geeks sure do work that way on malware, without blinking an eyelash, when it comes down to their property -- their servers, their tribe, their rules.
They could care less about Hollywood, another California tribe with whom they are at war.
There's yet another thing you could do if just blocking out one link from a newsletter isn't practical or the engineering is too hard or whatever.
You could just block all links in the newsletter, but let the text through.
Of course a service like this isn't going to customize a damn thing for a non-paying customer and that's understood, although they dine out on their free-ness as a "Freemium" business model. When I used their MailChimp paid service, I never recall a single newsletter larded with RU links ever being stopped LOL.
I'm not going to plead a special case here for Russia and people who write exotic newsletters on Tajikistan, about whom few people care.
I have a larger point to make: WHEN tekkies want to block links on the Internet THEY DO. AND THE INTERNET DOES NOT BREAK AS A RESULT.
Of course there are blocks at the DNS level so that it doesn't resolve or try to resolve (remember that Bennett pointed out that this idea that sites seeking a bad URL leading to a pirate address would not in fact "keep casting about" and that was fictional. What happens is they, um, hang. Which often happens when I try to go to those Russian-language opposition sites merely using Firefox. Or sometimes I will get that "this is not a trusted site" message.
But tekkis form societies, share blacklists, make blockages ALL THE TIME. This idea that they "can't" do this for pirate sites is merely ideological. Of course they can and it's the same principle. But it's awfully hilarious that tekkis pretend there is something different about these conceptually similar practices. In fact, tekkies never worry about throwing the content baby out with the malware bathwater at all -- they never think a site deserves a second look or a special dispensation when evil malware is involved. But when it comes to piracy, suddenly they get all thinky and "oh, a chill on free speech" nonsense comes out of their mouths.
Additional:
Here's a question from a geek with the handle "Hammar":
A point that keeps getting mentioned in the SOPA debate is that the DNS blocking it prescribes will cause security problems. Can somebody explain in simple terms just exactly how SOPA threatens Internet security?
Good question! And one to KEEP ASKING because so much bullshit has been thrown up around it.
A geek named Graham Hill on that IT security site answers and thinks he has the simple, correct, only answer:
o attackers may use false infringement claims as a denial-of-service attack.
o ISPs may start doing deep packet inspection on their customer's traffic, to look for infringing content.
o it may interfere with the effectiveness of, or take-up of, DNSSEC.
Let's take that last one first: we just saw (above) this same site discuss how big corporations aren't using this. It's expensive, hard, and unnecessary as they can use other things. The military uses it. Some sites, like Paypal evidently, uses it. But not everybody. Far from everybody. It is still controversial. So all that hoopla about how SOPA would "break" this thing was fake. Even if they did decide to use this new regime, it's not at all clear to me that DNSSEC would in fact be incompatible with a simple practice of blocking the big piracy sites for commercial gain. Like I said: geeks block sites all the time.
Next up: ISPs "may" start doing deep packet inspection looking for infringement. Well, no. There was never anything remotely like that in the text of the bill. This was a tekkie hysterical hypethical. They believed the ISPs would be on the hook for enforcement, when in fact the regime would continue as it always did: WHEN they get a report of infringement, THEN they act. Nothing pro-active was required of them; indeed, in the text of the bill, it specifically said that they need not pro-actively monitor. That would remove their "save haven." SOPA was not about removing that.
No ISP would undertake the expense, headache, and time to do this when the law did not require it. It was a way for tekkies to pretend that to stop these few pirate sites, somebody would have to sift through haystacks looking for needles. No, the needles were already easily found with a magnet. Next.
Now for the first claim, well, it's that paranoid geek thinking that projects the way they think and act on others who in fact don't work that way as they aren't binary and literalist. IF a false report is given (like on my blog, or by authoritarian governments claiming opposition is malware) then...you investigate it and fix it. It's not really the big deal claimed. Please find me the cases and case law on people claiming infringement to shut down *legitimate* expression -- and don't use Kit Dotcom or dajaz1.
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