I don’t want to be an enabler of the drivel, so without posting the full URL to that article that’s reachable in the open free world, I will just say that medium.com links should never be publicly shared outside of Cloudflare’s walled garden. I realise aussie.zone is also in Cloudflare’s walled garden, but please be aware that it’s federated and reaches audiences who are excluded by Cloudflare.

The medium.com portion of the URL should be replaced by scribe.rip to make a medium article reachable to everyone. Though I must say this particular article doesn’t need any more reach than it has.

Anyone who just wants the answer: see @[email protected]’s comment in this thread.

A website isn’t a common carrier

We were talking about network neutrality, not just common carriers (which are only part of the netneutrality problem).

you cannot argue that a website isn’t allowed to control who they serve their content to.

Permission wasn’t the argument. When a website violates netneutrality principles, it’s not a problem of acting outside of authority. They are of course permitted to push access inequality assuming we are talking about the private sector where the contract permits it.

Cloudflare is a tool websites use to exercise that right,

One man’s freedom is another man’s oppression.

necessitated by the ever rising prevalence of bots and DDoS attacks.

It is /not/ necessary to use a tool as crude and reckless as Cloudflare to defend from attacks with disregard to collateral damage. There are many tools in the toolbox for that and CF is a poor choice favored by lazy admins.

Your proposed definition of net neutrality would destroy anyone’s ability to deal with these threats.

Only if you neglect to see admins who have found better ways to counter threats that do not make the security problem someone elses.

Can you at least provide examples of legitimate users who are hindered by the use of Cloudflare?

That was enumerated in a list in the linked article you replied to.

Interstate commerce is governed by the federal government.

Not exclusively. Interstate commerce implies that the feds can regulate it, not that they have exclusive power to do so. We see this with MJ laws. The fed believes it has the power to prohibit marijuana on the basis of interstate commerce, but in fact mj can be grown locally, sold locally, and consumed locally. Just like internet service can be.

Suppose you want to buy a stun gun in New York. You can find stun guns sold via mail order from another state (thus interstate commerce), but New York still managed to ban them despite the role of interstate commerce.

A close analog would be phone laws. The fed has the TCPA to protect you from telemarketers, but at the same time various states add additional legal protections for consumers w.r.t. telemarketing and those laws have force even if the caller is outside the country. (Collecting on the judgement is another matter).

Schools now require the internet for kids. ISPs being allowed to be anything more than a dumb pipe means they have the control of what information is sent across their network.

Education is specifically a duty of the state set out in the Constitution. If you can point to the statute requiring schools to provide internet for students, I believe it will be state law not federal law that you find.

The internet is now a basic human right in the United States for numerous reasons, one of which is #2.

I don’t quite follow. Are you saying that because education is a human right, that internet access is a human right? It doesn’t work that way. First of all, people who do not exercise their right to an education would not derive any rights implied by education. As for the students, if a state requires internet in education that does not mean that internet access becomes a human right. E.g. an Amish family might lawfully opt to homeschool their child, without internet. That would satisfy the right to education enshrined in the Unified Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) just fine. A student attending public school in a state that mandates internet in schools would merely have the incidental privilege of internet access, not an expanded human right that students in other states and countries do not have under the same human rights convocation. If your claim were true, it would mean that California (for example) requiring internet provisions for students would then mean students in Haiti (a country that also signed the UDHR that entitles people to a right to education) or Texas would gain a right to internet access via the state of California’s internal law. A state cannot amend the UDHR willy nilly like that.

Also, if internet could be construed as a human right by some mechanism that’s escaping me, the fed is not exclusively bound by human rights law. The fed signed the treaty, but all governments therein (state and local) are also bound to uphold human rights. Even private companies are bound to human rights law in the wording of the text, though expectation of enforcement gets shaky.

ISPs cross state boundaries and should be governed by interstate law.

I subscribed to internet service from a WISP at one point. A dude in my neighborhood rolled out his own ISP service. His market did not even exceed the city.

The local ISPs have ISPs themselves and as you climb the supply chain eventually you get into the internet backbone which would be interstate, but that’s not where the netneutrality problem manifests. The netneutrality problem is at the bottom of the supply chain in the last mile of cable where the end user meets their local ISP.

Also with MJ laws, several states have liberated the use of marijuana despite the feds using the interstate commerce act to ban it.

An ISP being a business, especially a publicly-traded one, will sacrifice all manner of consumer/user-protection in order to maximize profit. And having the states govern against that will lead to a smattering of laws where it becomes muddy on what can actually be enforced, and where.

Sure, and if the fed is relaxed because the telecoms feed the warchests of the POTUS and Congress, you have a nationwide shit-show. A progressive state can fix that by imposing netneutrality requirements. Just like many states introduce extra anti-telemarketing laws that give consumers protection above and beyond the TCPA.

And having the states govern against that will lead to a smattering of laws where it becomes muddy on what can actually be enforced, and where.

That’s a problem for the ISPs that benefits consumers. If ISPs operating in different states then have to adjust their framework for one state that mandates netneutrality, the cost of maintaining different frameworks in different states becomes a diminishing return. US consumers often benefit from EU law in this way. The EU forced PC makers to make disassembly fast and trivial, so harmful components could quickly and cheaply be removed before trashing obsolete hardware. The US did not impose this. Dell was disturbed because they had to make pro-environment adjustments as a condition to access to the EU market. They calculated that it would be more costly to sell two different versions, so the PCs they made for both the EU market and the US market become more eco-friendly. Thanks to the EU muddying the waters.

The right to repair will have the same consequences.

On a serious note, plenty of people here surely know what net neutrality is. Net neutrality is the guarantee that your ISP doesn’t (de-)prioritize traffic or outright block traffic, all packets are treated equally.

That’s true but it’s also the common (but overly shallow) take. It’s applicable here and good enough for the thread, but it’s worth noting that netneutrality is conceptually deeper than throttling and pricing games and beyond ISP shenanigans. The meaning was coined by Tim Wu, who spoke about access equality.

People fixate on performance which I find annoying in face of Cloudflare, who is not an ISP but who has done by far the most substantial damage to netneutrality worldwide by controlling who gets access to ~50%+ of world’s websites. The general public will never come to grasp Cloudflare’s oppression or the scale of it, much less relate it to netneutrality, for various reasons:

• Cloudflare is invisible to those allowed inside the walled garden, so its existence is mostly unknown
• The masses can only understand simple concepts about their speed being throttled. Understanding the nuts and bolts of discrimination based on IP address reputation is lost on most.
• The US gov is obviously pleased that half the world’s padlocked web traffic is trivially within their unwarranted surveillance view via just one corporation in California. They don’t want people to realize the harm CF does to netneutrality and pressure lawmakers to draft netneutrality policy in a way that’s not narrowly ISP-focused.

Which means netneutrality policy is doomed to ignore Cloudflare and focus on ISPs.

Most people at least have some control over which ISP they select. Competition is paltry, but we all have zero control over whether a website they want to use is in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden.

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

/cc @[email protected]

Whether the legislation is appropriate at the state or fed domain is unclear. Certainly if the orange tyrant takes power again, I would probably want state govs to be able to protect consumers from netneutrality abuses.

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

• Cloudflare
• Comcast

Both of whom are abusers of #netneutrality, especially Cloudflare. A well-informed Trump-free administration should be showing Cloudflare and Comcast the door ASAP.

Sure, Trump would just bring them back. But it’d at least be a good symbolic move.

Indeed, as someone else pointed out, the needed change should come from pro-netneutrality legislation. And the legislation needs to be broad enough to block Cloudflare’s broad discriminatory arbitrary attack on access equality, not just tinker with speeds at the ISP consumer level.

Hence why we need a public option.

from the article:

Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display Your non-personal data for its business purposes.

Holy shit. I wonder if HP is feeding customers’ data to an #AI machine to exploit in some way. It doesn’t even seem to be limited to what people print. HP’s software package is probably not just a printer driver. But even if it is, a driver runs in the kernel space, so IIUC there’s no limit to what data it can mine.

Glad to see mention of Oki! Oki is the single most ethical choice. But they pulled out of the US market, sadly enough. The US is no place for ethical products.

First and foremost, #HP is not an option for anyone who boycotts #Israel. And even neglecting that, HP is still the least ethical of all ink suppliers.

from the article:

Prices range from $6.99 per month for a plan that includes an HP Envy printer (the current model is the 6020e) and 20 printed pages. The priciest plan includes an HP OfficeJet Pro rental and 700 printed pages for $35.99 per month.

So the 20 page deal probably reflects the consumption of most households that print. That means the cost ranges from $7—35¢ per page. You must print 20 pages to reach 35¢ pp. A library would likely charge ~5—10¢ pp flat. Print shops tend to be cheaper than libraries.

The 700 page deal amounts to $36—5¢ pp. So you have to print exactly 700 pages to get a good price. Everyone who does not print exactly 700 pages every month for a span of 2 years will get screwed.

One of the most perturbing aspects of the subscription plan is that it requires subscribers to keep their printers connected to the Internet.

Bingo. It’s not a “smart” printer, it’s a dependent printer.

Anonymity is part of privacy.

Specifically, anonymity is confidentiality of identity. Confidentiality is part of privacy, which is a broad concept. So when a tool or mechanism works against anonymity, it works against privacy. It may not work against a privacy aspect that you care about, but it’s privacy nonetheless.

You’re referring to anonymity, not privacy.

Anonymity is part of privacy; not a dichotomy.

Sign-up still requires a phone number… -.-"

Thanks for the warning – that was my first question. It is my top reason (among many other reasons) for avoiding Signal.

Checkout Matrix/Element or Session,

All 3 of the sites you linked are Cloudflare sites (thus antithetical to privacy). Yes, I know you can use some of that tech without touching CF, but when they run CF websites it reveals hypocrisy & not understanding the goals of their audience.

I can’t watch videos but I will say that my biggest problem with the iME is not the security issue, but the anti-consumer aspect. Intel decided non-corporate consumers (who do not want or benefit from iME) can be disregarded marginalized. So disabling iME is insufficient and misses the problem.

The answer is to boycott iME CPUs. I never bought an intel CPU after 2008. I write this comment from a 16 year old PC just fine. I have pulled some more recent hardware out of dumpsters, ensuring I do not support anti-consumer products.

iME can be “disabled” if you go along with all the hand-waving. The nuts and bolts of it is that the ME /must/ execute when powering on the CPU, but then there is a moment in the boot sequence in which it can be disabled. For some people, that’s good enough.

#YaCy is an open source crawler that you can run and feed Searx with. I recall some searx instances that run their own YaCy. YaCy can also share indexes with other YaCy instances.

indeed. I cannot reach this link from tor:

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html

#DuckDuckGo makes the same claim as well. IMO it’s a great marketing tactic to say “we have our own crawler” to imply to people they will get some unique results-- but I’m not convinced that supplemental crawlers are significant. They are all too happy to rely on the crutch of the search engines they source from.

Mozilla is not in danger so long as they continue to serve Google. You cut 83% of Mozilla’s revenue and I guarantee you there will be problems.