North Holland is quickly rising in datacenter fame... They also have an ongoing conflict between local and higher level government about Microsoft building a huge datacenter and using all their renewable (wind) energy.
Can confirm, it’s kind of ridiculous to build all kinds of renewable energy sources only to have them cause a massive increase in datacenter electricity usage, because they want to become 100% renewable. It would maybe be OK if they weren’t subsidized as heavily.
Honestly, this sounds like a “don’t hate the player, hate the game” thing to me. If you subsidize something, IMO it should come as no surprise that people want to take advantage of that subsidy. If people they don’t want to use that subsidy are using it, they probably should have written the terms and conditions more explicitly.
Also, the electricty grid around amsterdam is basically filled to the brim, and there has been a ban on expending datacenters in the area because of energy concerns.
In my opinion this is quite a good thing, considering this would ditribute the datacenters more across the netherlands.
> "Armin received a bottle of jenever in thanks. „But the customs made me throw it away before the return flight. I couldn’t even take a sip.”"
It would have been airport security that made him throw it away, not customs. At that time, the UK was part of the customs union, so there were no customs on a flight between the Netherlands and UK.
Can you not take spirits, wine, or beer (sealed) on a flight in the EU? EDIT: Removed question about duty free, answered by replies below.
Odd, as in the US, there is no limit if in your checked baggage if below 24% ABV, and 5 liters if 24% - 70% (carry on has much stricter limits [3.4oz or less that can fit comfortably in one quart-sized, clear, zip-top bag], but is still permitted).
They are after the checkpoints and they are marked. So you can take them on board. But that likely won't work for next flight if you have to through security again... Also some airlines sell stuff that is directly deposited on your seat.
You can buy it from a duty-free shop even if you have multiple flights, even if you have to transfer out of the security area - they seal it in a special bag with receipts attached; when you go to your next security check-in, you present the sealed bag, and they check if it has been less than 24h since it was purchased, they inspect the seals, and they let you through if everything is in order.
You can from duty free, just nothing that you bring from outside the airport that goes with your carry-on that passes through security.
Your luggage can carry spirits or whatever other drinks you want, just not carry-on though. For... Safety reasons, obviously.
For checked-in bags, there is no limit in the EU at all as far as I know. The problem is with carry-on, where you are extremely limited in the quantity of liquids you can get past security - no more than ~100ml, and even then it must be in a bottle inside a clear plastic bag.
There probably isn't an EU-level limit, but member countries can set them. In Finland you can bring as much as you want for your own use, but past some point you need to be able to actually prove that it's for your own use. Current guidelines are: 110 liters of beer, 10 liters of other alcohol drinks, 20 liters of max 22 % intermediate products, 90 liters of wines or fermented long drinks/ciders. Common reasons for bringing more than that are e.g. your own wedding.
when flying back from china, the duty free shop asked me what my next airport was (Seattle) and whether it was a connecting flight or not (it was). at that point, they told me that they wouldn't sell me anything, as I would have it confiscated.
they were correct, the international arrivals required another bag check to enter the domestic part of the airport, that had the stringent TSA rules (after you went through customs and collected your luggage, before you could drop your luggage off again for your next flight).
so, it appears to be airport by airport when traveling to the US.
Just to confirm, you had a bag check for checked baggage after customs and before your domestic flight, and this was done by the TSA? I've flown into and around the US countless times, including international to domestic connections at SEA, and have never heard of this.
Not doubting your experience because policies change, but every US airport I've flown into has customs and immigration after an international flight, and after re-checking in your hold baggage if you have any, virtually all then route you to the normal TSA check before a domestic flight unless there's an airside transfer option directly to the gates.
you exited the international flight, went through customs, picked up your luggage, and then if you were continuing on to a domestic flight (which required getting past the secured area to the monorail), then you had to go through security again.
at this point, you could no longer have anything in your checked baggage that could not go through standard TSA security, as you were already inside the secured area. some airlines (Alaska, for instance) allowed you to check your baggage PAST that security area, but you still had to make it past.
since you had already picked up your checked baggage, and no longer could get to any connecting flights without either exiting the airport completely (far away from other flights), or going through security again with your luggage to continue to the monorail, you were pretty much screwed.
editing to add: there were a lot of very unhappy people who had their airline provided or purchased past security water bottles being taken away before they could continue to their domestic flights. I have no clue exactly how far I would have had to walk outside of security to get to the domestic terminal, but my flight was so soon that I would never have chanced it.
double editing to add that I've flown international through other airports and never had that type of experience other than through Seattle.
triple editing to note that even SEATAC seemed to think this was a mess and the new international arrivals terminal is due to open "soon".
> „But the customs made me throw it away before the return flight. I couldn’t even take a sip.”"
B.S.
Before a flight, a highly paid (given what they do) security theather monkey tried to demand that I forfeit an expensive bottle.
Knowing full well how it works in most countries, where the loots are split at the end of the day, I said "watch this", chugged it down, and voluntarily surrendered the now empty bottle.
At least I enjoyed it partly!
Even if later I did throw up during the flight, I prefer being sick than my luxury bottle being stolen by a security theater monkey.
The human body is wonderfully done: you then throw up.
It was a smelly flight however. Sorry, plane ground! Sorry, seat neighbours!
But it was funny when the stewardess asked my why I was sick: I just told the truth, I was drunk! What was she going to do anyway? Throw me out of the first class and into the main cabin?
Accuracy? Always worth striving for. For example it’s akin to saying “the police made me go through a metal detector” if building security did or “the nurse gave me CPR” when a lifeguard did.
They’re....close but it isn’t the same.
In case you were asking literally: security are the people that make you throw out liquids due to bomb threats and check for weapons. Customs see you after the plane across a border and check that you didn’t bring anything that requires payment of border tax. If you do, they will make you pay the tax at the border before entry.
> When the hoster receives an official request from the US to remove copyrighted materials – a DMCA takedown notice – the men do nothing about it, says a person who saw it happen. „DMCAs are just tossed in the wastepaper basket.” Subletters even advertise this ‘service’. „DMCA ignored” reads one advertisement offering space in the „state of the art Ecatel DataCenter, located in Amsterdam”.
The Dutch hosting company doesn't obey US law. My god! Can you believe these assholes? Running a hosting company that just hosts, and doesn't snoop into what their customers are doing? And how dare they make enforcement agencies actually go through the required legal processes to enforce the law!
Copyright laws are international. If you think WIPO won’t enforce a DMCA claim because “American laws don’t apply outside of the US” (Bwahahahaha! Ha hahah! gasp HAHAH!! Ha! Ha! Ahh heh heh heh... oh, my...) you’re kidding yourself.
You can't enforce a DMCA claim against an entity without ties to the US. You can enforce a copyright claim against an entity in a jurisdiction that respects copyright, but you're going to need to use that jurisdiction's procedures.
I'm sure these companies don't throwout local court summons, but a lot of copyright holders (or their agents) send out DMCA claims and don't follow through beyond that.
> You can't enforce a DMCA claim against an entity without ties to the US
a “DMCA claim" isn’t really the issue, the DMCA safe harbor (takedowns aren’t a basis for claims, but for safe harbor from claims against the provider) doesn’t apply outside of US law. To the extent another jurisdiction has provider liability, following US DMCA takedown rules won't protect you from it.
The core copyright laws e.g. the Berne convention are international and pretty much universally accepted, however, DMCA goes way beyond that, and several key provisions of DMCA - including the specific takedown process and the prohibition on distributing DRM-circumvention tools - is USA-specific law that does not have an equivalent in many other jurisdictions.
Many of the robo-DMCA-claim firms simply search for the string of a movie title. If the page in question is determined by their poorly written software to include the content, a DMCA takedown request is spammed. No human confirmation is involved. One wonders who the abusers and spammers are in this situation.
Of course some will claim that provisions exist for damages to be claimed in the event of false takedowns, but it is hard if not impossible to collect. Typically you need to provide all of your personal data to respond.
I wish people would find a way to monetize obviously false DMCA requests.
I know of some people who basically finance their niche bulletin boards via police requests - they get something in the range of 2-3 digits (€) for a information request. Get a few of these a year and your hosting costs are paid.
There's not a lot of money to be made but if it's your hobby anyways..
"...this title shall pay to the person or entity assembling or providing such information a fee for reimbursement for such costs as are reasonably necessary and which have been directly incurred in searching for, assembling, reproducing, or otherwise providing such information."
Not your lawyer. Just providing a link to an example law describing how some ISPs can profit from data requests.
I remember uploading a BF3 montage on YouTube some eons ago when it was all the rage, no copyrighted music or anything. I received a DMCA claim by some spanish tv/broadcasting company or something along those lines, totally unrelated to my content.
---
The fact that DMCA claims can be issued with no human interaction and no repurcussions is beyond me. If anything, the hosting company should at least issue penalties on false claims.
> If anything, the hosting company should at least issue penalties on false claims.
If penalties are issued by the hosting company, then they just won't be paid. Then you lose: there's no way to take all the non-paying offenders to court, and you can't ignore subsequent requests, so you wind up in the same situation as you're in now.
Instead, move the onus off the hosting company: if they receive from some entity a DMCA takedown that is believed to be false (according to whatever standards are applied to counterclaims), then no further takedown notices from that entity are required to be obeyed until the entity takes appropriate remedial action.
> if they receive from some entity a DMCA takedown that is believed to be false (according to whatever standards are applied to counterclaims)
There are no standards for counterclaims except format standards. All a counterclaim does is permit undoing a takedown without the provider being liable, transferring determination of who is right to litigation between the purported copyright owner and the content uploader with the host fully immunized.
> A DMCA claim (or takedown) is when a copyright holder notifies a service provider that they have infringing material on their site/service. It is also known as a “Notification of Infringement”. For example, Twitch has these guidelines for submitting DMCA claims. Essentially it boils down to send in writing who you are, who is infringing your rights, how they’re doing it, and swear under penalty of perjury that you are telling the truth.
You have to counterfile, but there's a poison pill in the regulation that by doing so you agree U.S. courts have jurisdiction, thereby nullifying any protections you have from being in another countries juridiction.
I mean, there is no getting around it if you want the countersuit to work and reflect poorly on the claimant, but you are agreeing to letting the U.S. have extra-territorial jurisdiction.
> Of course some will claim that provisions exist for damages to be claimed in the event of false takedowns
If the falsity is only in regard to the not-under-perjury parts of a takedown notice (like, say, that there is infringing content!), then you maybe, in some circumstances, have a tortious interference claim, but, generally, you are screwed. If you are lucky, your host has and follows a counternotice process and you can get the material back up, but recovering any damages is unlikely.
Yes the DMCA is a terrible law that isn't based on justice, but rather was one of the first laws bought by copyright holders so they could attack the nascent Internet. This was apparent at the time, and the community tried to fight it. But as with most ratcheting authoritarianism, we lost and it's just how things are now. I feel like this has been forgotten, based on how people talk about the claim-counterclaim process expecting it to be equitable.
I don't care morally about the DMCA, but you're a dick if you pull pranks on your child pornography reporting form
> For reasons that are unclear, the web form that the two men drew up for reporting gruesome images is designed in such a way that the system can only handle five reports an hour. That is unworkable, according to the hotline.
I might care more once laws start protecting children from those in power more than used by those in power as a ploy to dismantle privacy from ordinary people.
If there were only one source, I'd agree with you. But we've had an avalanche of distinct sources coming forward on this story. It seems highly likely that charges are coming very soon. If you watch Fox, you might have missed it, since he was a recurring contributor to their network (fitting, given how many sexual predators they've employed) and they've been trying to downplay it.
When did I say I didn't care about protecting children? I said I didn't care about a hosting company throwing DMCA complaints in the trash, and I refuse to give into any bullying that says supporting free speech is the same thing as hurting children.
> I might care more once laws start protecting children from those in power more than used by those in power as a ploy to dismantle privacy from ordinary people.
In response to a thread comment regarding to the said hosting provider making it purposely difficult to report such matters...
DARVO. You did not say you didn't care about DMCA complaints, you responded to a point about 'a web form for reporting gruesome images.' Nobody bullied you.
The link between the production of child porn and child protection is crystal clear.
The link between hosting child porn and child protection is much more subject to argument. I'd suggest it is banned because enough people suspect the link to be there, not because of any certainty.
It is unfortunately common for terrible ideas to be shepherded in under the pretence of thinking about the children. There needs to be debate about costs and benefits of this stuff beyond the crystal clear parts. It isn't reasonable to just assume someone doesn't care about protecting children just because they're willing to host anything. Although in this case they are being rather disrespectful to the people who use the form and that doesn't sit well with me.
>used by those in power as a ploy to dismantle privacy from ordinary people.
Is there anything in the article indicating that child porn policies are being used to reduce ordinary people's privacy? From the article it sounds like they just want the child porn taken down, not any details about anyone.
>Dutch law states that a hosting company cannot be prosecuted for the actions of those who hire its servers. It is impossible for a hosting company to know the content of every byte on those servers. But hosting companies are required to take action if they are informed of the presence of illegal content. The question is how quickly and how actively they do so.
Chucking a DMCA in the trash sounds like it's against Dutch law
Copyright isn't a US thing - its an international thing. One doesn't have to register their copyright in every country to publish a picture (for that matter, they don't even need to register the copyright to have it be protected).
I didn't even go down that road. There's nothing compelling a Dutch company to comply with the DMCA. The context of "illegal" that was quoted a few comments up isn't "DMCA", it's "illegal". Like, against Dutch law. Child phonography might be a good example.
On that matter though, here's what copyright.gov has to say:
"There is no such thing as an “international copyright” that will automatically protect an author’s writings throughout the world. Protection against unauthorized use in a particular country depends on the national laws of that country."
There is such a thing, actually. Not explicitly, but international copyright law has been largely harmonized through the Berne Convention. With 179 signatories its a pretty universal 'floor' for copyright protections. The only big abstention was the USSR and they aren't around anymore.
>(vi)A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
A DMCA claim isn't a "notification of illegal images." It is a statement of "I own the (copy)rights to this work and you do not have permission to host/use it."
> The Dutch hosting company doesn't obey US law. My god! Can you believe these assholes? Running a hosting company that just hosts, and doesn't snoop into what their customers are doing? And how dare they make enforcement agencies actually go through the required legal processes to enforce the law!
The hosting company could be a cesspool but I just checked one of the news blog site the article attributed to ‘right wing radicals’. The content looks like Dutch version of Buzzfeed or TMZ
https://vizieroplinks.org/
A version of Buzzfeed who put letter bombs through left-winger's mailboxes, regularly make death threats to left-wing politicians and generally act like a they're living in some third world anarchist state.
Sure. I guess I missed their point. I would consider it a source for the argument that they can't be compared to buzzfeed, and that people feel intimidated by them, but that's as far as it goes, correct.
This Nadia Bouras person has cheering on red paint 'attacks' on an elected right wing politician's home address front door a while ago. Something something black kettle.
I don't understand how you're so ok with attempting to discredit a decades worth of operations and real evidence in favour of a link that doesn't even prove what you claim.
It tries to smear left-wing people with some public visibility, in several cases showing pictures their houses, complete with a description of the location, just short of the actual address. They've also left stickers near these houses saying "location under observation". It's political intimidation.
These issues are endemic to any platform. Even mainstream blogging sites like Tumblr had issues with the large quantities of child pornography being shared by the users. It's the users posting illegal content that should be held accountable not the platform owners.
No. The servers in the data center are rented to specific clients. If these clients commit crimes and the DC operator knows about it but chooses not to shut down the offenders, that's their business feature.
I'm considering the previous posters comment on how the users who post illegal materials should be responsible, not the platform. But yeah that makes sense. In this case it would be as if the city knew about the child pornography on the street but decided not to do anything about it.
Not really. More like the city rents out the light poles to companies who can staple messages to them. Some companies put up CP. The city then tries their best to not shut them down, and protects these companies because they pay rates that are way above market. I.e. the "not taking it down" is part of the deal.
This statistic is according to the British Internet Watch Foundation.
Uncovering sources of CP is done pretty much equally for all countries considering the nature of the distribution of content and how it is uncovered and traced back.
The report seems to indicate that the majority of that number came from one site.
> "In 2018, slightly more than 200,000 links with possible child pornography were investigated," explains Wido Potters of industry organization ISPConnect Netherlands. "Of the reports that ultimately concerned child pornography, 80 percent were on an image board."
Also a hotspot for drugs trafficking, yet with a pristine official record of corruption, ranking as one of the ten least corrupt countries in the world. These seem incongruous, somehow.
There has been movement and cries for help about criminal influence at the municipal level. With cases of criminals getting elected, or mayor's being threatened for taking action against criminals.
These have been listened to, and a campaign to undermine criminality by law enforcement has been setup with moderate success. The issue is known in government and action is being taken. At the same time, our value and expertise is largely in logistics. Government tries to balance economic interests against crime fighting.
Meanwhile we are a huge logistics hub with a relatively small police force (cause we are a small country). So it makes sense that we are attractive for criminals.
What worries me most is the port of Rotterdam. It is big, vital, and known to have quite a large criminal element embedded in the workforce. Fixing that whilst keeping the port operational is probably quite difficult.
>yet with a pristine official record of corruption
A pristine record with whom?
I've worked for several years, on and off, in the Netherlands (and enjoyed doing so, mostly), and it has always seemed to me that they simply ignore any crimes and corruption they can't be bothered with.
Thing is, when normal citizens interact with government there is no corruption. Any corruption that exists is higher, political, and worried about exposure.
the south of the netherland is the largest XTC producer in Europe, and very hard to tackle because criminal enterprises are usually entrenched in local villages and communities.
Not incongruous, I think. By basically legalising drugs, prostitution, and similar victimless peccadillos (and focusing on treatment and support instead), you destroy the mob's business model, reduce opportunity for corruption, and allow cops to concentrate on real crime.
But actually the opposite is happening in the Netherlands.
There are drug labs basically everywhere in the countryside.
All global organized crime syndicates have a local presence.
With regards to prostitution, human trafficking has actually increased and prostitutes get imported and pimped out. Half the business is legal so the police have even less incentive to care, especially if the victim and the pimp are both foreign. Basically free tax money and no harm (to ethnic Dutch people).
The Netherlands may even have the worst drug laws in existence. Cannabis is not legalized, it's "tolerated". This means it's legal to sell and buy cannabis, but it is _not_ legal to grow it in any sizeable quantities[note]. This means the legal part of the cannabis sector relies exclusively on criminal activity. So instead of replacing the criminal business model, it instead depends on it.
Note: Since 2020 there have been some minor experiments with letting municipalities grow cannabis.
Yes definitely. It seems to me the hoster does everything that is required of it by law. Child porn is horrible but that doesn't mean the hoster should be responsible of policing the servers.
Law enforcement must go after the person who rented the server. That is the source of the problem. Going after the hoster is nothing but symptom relief.
I think the reverse is too naive. We see the exact abhorrent results that occurs when hosters are made liable. Look at youtube for example. There is no novel content any more. Everything that could offend someone is removes or demonitized.
What good does forcing a hoster to police their content? Do you think child porn will suddenly not exist anymore? Do you think child porn producer think "oh no, my website was taken down. Oh well I better stop doing this and get a stand up job."
The good it does is spreading it less. Demanding that a measure has to eradicate child pornography in order for it to be acceptable is ridiculous.
Hosting companies take responsibility, because they knowingly and willingly host content that's beyond the jurisdiction of the company's country's legislature. It can't be that a string of copper wire across a border is enough to remove liability.
It's not spreading less. Besides I never said a measure has to eradicate child porn for it to be acceptable.
Compare it to having acne. It's not recommended to pop the abscesses because it does nothing to treat the underlying issue and a week later you have them again. What you need to do is treat the underlying condition. Attacking hosters for hosting child porn is the same thing as popping acne ascesses. Sure you have taken down a few servers. But next week they will be back. It's just not effective. What you need to do is find the people that are making and spreading child porn.
> Tim Kuik, director of copyright organisation BREIN, says he was told by the men that he had to stop sending legally formulated letters of complaint. „They wanted a meeting where I would tell them what was wrong in a jovial tone, and then they might look at it.”
This is hilarious, I wish less sketchy companies would do this to DMCA requests.
> If the companies that give IP Volume access to the rest of the internet were all to decide to stop doing so, the company could no longer operate on the internet. This is called de-peering, and it does occur very sporadically.
> But it is highly controversial, says Guilmette. It flies in the face of the voluntary, decentralised structure of the internet. That is why the largest hub, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, say they won’t do it. A spokesman for the exchange: „We are only a highway, we have nothing to do with the content. You surely can’t expect us to paternalistically review what such a party is hosting?”
Like someone else said, it seems that AIE is trying to avoid higher charges in regard to implementing oversight measures. The oversight measures should have been there a long time ago.
It's like youtube saying that they're simply "a highway" for video hosting. If it's moving through your platform, you have to be aware of what it is. There are police monitoring highways, there is extensive monitoring on youtube, so why is AIM pretending that the same rules don't apply?
Do you have a stake in this article? Because from my point of view an account created 10 hours ago is rambling off technically incoherent straw-man on a tech focused forum.
Its like saying the postman most open, read and understand every piece of mail before delivering it, and the police must search inside every car before it may drive on the road.
Just because you don't agree with them (I don't happen to, either) doesn't mean they're being incoherent, rambling, or using a straw man. They are clearly responding topically and reasonably.
I would agree if the questions was about helping to catch someone who had made these videos. But hosting isn't a morality question, they are just storing a number, and hosting company should not have to care what interpretations of a number can exist.
Those ‘interpretations’ are tangible, meaningful products of harm inflicted on children. Let’s not pretend there’s an alternative – that anyone is using those bits in a different way.
So a bookstore is just selling colored pieces of paper, even if those pieces of paper are images of child abuse?
Seriously what is wrong with you? I get that cryto-anarchist are hip and think they're so cool, but there is a real human cost here. Are you OK with that?
Images of child abuse are not child abuse. Instead of wasting energy on fighting with windmills and numbers, it would be better to concentrate efforts on catching child abusers, and keeping an eye on people who buy such books, to prevent crimes.
The argument is exactly the same as the argument for not banning alcohol, decriminalizing drugs etc. Fight against actual crime instead of wasting resources on ineffective measures that look "morally right".
> If there's no market for such pictures, likely less children will suffer the consequences.
The market will always exist: pedophiles. They have been and will be among us until the end of times.
> Fighting the crime directly is important, but so is doing it indirectly.
Yes, but the difference is so abysmal that you know where is more important to put the effort. Stopping even 1 child of being abused is better than stopping the sharing of 1 million child porn pics.
You're assuming that fighting one has no relation to fighting the other. Often the way breakthroughs are made here is in the disco very of networks and the roles of key players in the networks. In some cases, CP is shared by trading, with higher value placed on "new" material, which directly creates an incentive to produce CP not just distribute.
The law handles drawings and 3d graphics the same way as real images.
The attempt to fight indirectly clearly had not succeeded so far. And most often is used as a pretext for introducing mechanisms that afterwards are used for censorship.
I don't advocate for one policy or another. In fact i'd be happy if i was wrong and the fight with numbers was actually useful, but logic tells that it isn't.
Seriously, stop with this crap. The people on this forums are some of the people who have the know-how to actually DO something about the internet. If they can't discuss these things, we get the situation that your company seems to like - SV decides what's allowed on the internet and what's not. Those of us outside of the US don't like it very much, and we'd prefer to - you know - talk about it.
Obviously when people with know-how want to discuss what they know-how about, that's on topic on HN. But you're underestimating the quantity of plain old internet slag, which is what repetitive flamewars (especially on classic flamewar topics) quickly turn into. "You are a pedo sympathiser and apologist" and similar dreck repels the users who actually know things and who make HN a worthwhile place, so your argument ends in a contradiction.
If you'd like to offer advice about HN moderation, breaking the site guidelines while doing so is unlikely to persuade.
probably depends on what the training set was, or whether the hand-drawn image is similar enough to a person's appearance to convince a jury or something, but that's a technical point. i'm objecting on old-fashioned moralist grounds to the psycho who's advocating for legalizing child pornography.
Judging by history old fashioned moralist grounds tend to be a bit shaky, and often yield their positions;).
I don't advocate for one policy or another. In fact i'd be happy if i was wrong and the fight with numbers was actually useful. But i am rather sceptical about it, because the only argument its supporters have is "think of the children, you monster!"
Anytime those images/videos are shared you are victimizing the abused.
Disagree? I would love to see enablers/apologists put some skin in the game (pun intended) and start posting some of their favorite images of them getting abused. Let's see some of that philosophy in action!
It would help if people critical of the distribution of child porn would make rational arguments without displaying obvious anger but this is a topic that somehow brings out the hate in people. You're just revealing that you don't have the ability to objectively consider what you're talking about and your opinion is worth no more than a Christian's negative opinion of blasphemy. Are you OK with people using God's name in vain? Seriously? The same God that gave you life? See how silly that argument is.
whoa nelly. asking for a "rational argument" against distributing child porn before launching into one of the strangest combinations of ad hom and strawman arguments I've ever seen on this web site. here I'll break it down for you:
The grandparent post said (abbreviating):
But hosting isn't a morality question, they are just storing a number, and hosting company should not have to care what interpretations of a number can exist.
The parent post responded, saying that this is a flawed line of reasoning, because it (imo purposefully) glosses over an important distinction between hosting child porn and hosting most numbers:
but there is a real human cost here
hope this helps you come to a decision on whether hosting child porn is bad or not!
so because child porn and not-child-porn are both stored and transmitted as bytestreams from a hosting company's servers, you can't actually draw a distinction between them? is that where we're landing on this one?
"Playing opera on my stereo isn't a morality question, I'm just creating vibrations in the air, and I should not have to care what interpretations of those vibrations can exist when I play it at 4am with the dial cranked to 11"
can you see how playing semantic games to try to dodge responsibility for poor behavior can be irritating even in the best of circumstances?
It's actually very normal and rational to be angered by child abuse. You aren't above it all and morally superior by talking about how you're not angered by children being abused.
Honestly, we shouldn't have to worry about publishing those, but banks like to use them as "proof of identity" for some stupid reason, so sharing them can cause problems.
Regardless of how widely disclosed information might be or what its owner has done with it in the past, sharing PII that doesn’t belong to you on a public forum is still doxing. Particularly when you hold it out to be your own among people who might not have that context, given the question you’re “answering”.
He also learned his lesson over a decade ago, and furthering that lesson unnecessarily as you have here borders on harassment.
I'll try to be more careful in the future, but what part of my comment was more controversial and flame war provoking than sibling comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684910?
You perpetuated it as well as starting it. Your comments were probably more provocative also—but even if not, what another user does isn't really relevant. We don't come close to seeing all the comments that get posted here, so moderation can't be either complete or consistent, and each user needs to follow the rules regardless of what other commenters are up to.
Would „confidental computing”[1] be able to provide a solution in this situation? If it is encrypted using a TEE, they would have no way of knowing what kind of data they are hosting.
Yes, you can use one of the four horsemen of internet crime to strip rights from everyone who isn’t doing anything wrong, or, you can realize the good will always outweigh the bad.
Odd to see so many people come up with ways to defend this unethical business.
It's hard to pin it on them legally but they are still dicks doing dicky things, they know it and they do it on purpose, and there is no clear way to fight it.
I am not advocating for vigilantism, but it seems to me that these kinds of people who are career criminals can only be meaningfully stopped by other criminals.
Police and lawyers are powerless, due to red tape and limitations in the system. So it would seemingly follow that only those who don't rely on legal means of recourse can put a stop to them.
In other words: Batman. This is how you get Batman.
So true, the horrors of the stuff they are hosting is profound. If they where even slightly on the up and up then it might destroy their business. While reading this article there needs to be better legislative powers, but I guess big tech has its own power. The governments hands are tied because so much of the Dutch economy is becoming hosting of data probably driven by the lacks laws. Some changes to this system and it comes down all pretty quickly. We need some intelligence people that need to go on to inside of this place and make sure when things come up to intervene. Maybe have the capabilities to trace where it’s originating from. NRC did a great job republishing this story in English maybe there will be European pressure now.
Most data centers with the reviews these guys have would not last. This one is able to find a market because despite everything bad they do, there's a strong market demand to overcome ridiculous DMCA, GDPR, and other internet regulations. They can be a shitty service provider in every conceivable way, but because they are able to exist in a void instigated upon us by bad legislation, they can continue on in a way others cannot.
I doubt many here would defend the way the business is being run. But misguided attempts at regulating the internet at the legislative level gives rise to these kinds of problems in the market. I am sure many here are simply sick of seeing this play out again and again. Just like how drug prohibition gave rise to international drug cartels, internet content regulation gives rise to data centers that flaunt those rules.
They don't exist because of some anti-conformity, they exist because there are people in the world that like to host malware, spam and child pornography. That is why they exist and the only reason they exist.
Somehow, when the following two sentences are put together I lose all hope in the world's incentive structure:
"Grapperhaus instituted a number of measures. [...] Companies would have to respond to a notification from the child pornography hotline without discussion within 24 hours"
"In 2015, Ecatel became embroiled in a lengthy conflict with the Premier League in the UK over claims of illegal streaming of football matches over Ecatel’s network. Streams must be removed by court order within 20 minutes of a notification."
How fast does the ban hammer need to be to restore your hope? You know that "porn filtration", regularly used to justify state censorship, always ends up filtering speech that the state just doesn't want heard? I forget from where the latest porn blacklist leaked, either NZ or AU, but it was full of sites the likes of WikiLeaks.
Which means very little in light of my criticism: "think of the children" is a pretense and there is no shortage of people who still fall for it. Complaining about the subterfuge not aligning with your ideals is just goofy.
Football streams are live events. Pornography files generally aren't. The harm from pornography isn't in the viewing (except in a very diffuse sense, not per marginal view); it's in the creation which already happened. Keeping a pornography video up a bit longer is actually positive for law enforcement, since that provides viewer logs that law enforcement can investigate and likely make more arrests.
>By that logic we should leave it up indefinitely?
You probably don't want to continue hosting it as some visitors to your website might leave your site or it may cause PR issues if you keep it up.
>than even a second of leaving child pornography up
There is no harm do doing that. Child porn is a single internet search away and people into that kind of stuff probably already have those kind of sites bookmarked. A few random visitors seeing those kind of images is not going to hurt anyone. A full illegal stream is a potential lost sale where a second of child porn doesn't really do much since there already exist many free alternatives on the internet.
I don’t follow this logic either. You are saying that since child porn exists elsewhere we might as well leave up the stuff we find and have the ability to do something about?
I am saying the harm from child porn is not coming from a picture being up for a single second on a website. There exist websites where this content will stay up that are easily accessible. This is much more convenient to people who want to see that and it will attract a community of people who are into that kind of stuff.
I also gave reasons why it would be in your best interest to remove the images even if you had immunity from the legal problems from doing so. It's similar how you might not want to host gore.
The FBI disagrees, as they effectively operated one massive CP hidden service for something like a week after collaring the administrator. So how many children did they repeatedly victimize in that time? Zero, if you go off the number of agents prosecuted over it.
> So how many children did they repeatedly victimize in that time? Zero, if you go off the number of agents prosecuted over it.
If you go off the number of agents prosecuted for it, the FBI crime labs wholesale invention and fraudulent presentation of fiber “science” in both its own and, as a service provided to states, state prosecutions leading to numerous convictions and at least three executions grounded in state-agent perjury victimized zero people, too.
Law enforcement tends not to hold its own agents accountable for victimizing people, an issue which some particularly-victimized communities have made some high-profile complaints about over the last few years.
I almost look forward to the feds seizing large sums of bitcoin in the course of their investigations, because that seems to be the only time that there are consequences: when the evidence is mathematically provable and on a decentralized public ledger. Nearly without fail, a fed tries to steal the money - and is quickly caught. That almost never happens. I don't think the agent that totaled an impounded Ferrari F50 ever got anything more than a stern talking to.
> In the UK, ISPs are legally forced to block certain types of websites, such as those hosting copyright-infringing or trademarked content. Some ISPs also block other sites at their discretion, such as those that show extremist content, adult images, and child pornography. These latter blocks are voluntary and are not the same across the UK, but most ISPs usually tend to block child abuse content.
I enjoy the idea that a translater decided to include the dutch word hashcheckserver instead of looking for a similar english word.
> Grapperhaus instituted a number of measures. A technical system for detecting child pornography – a hashcheckserver – would be set up that hosting companies could join.
Almost every entity has oversight measures implemented to safeguard it from criminal negligence.
The laws in the Netherlands need to be updated to ensure that data hosting centres and their owners can't get away with criminal negligence.
And to everyone complaining about this with a "but my free speech" excuse - there are extensive legal procedures which ensure that allegations of criminal negligence are conducted openly and fairly.
How the Netherlands managed to avoid creating criminal negligence laws for these scenarios is beyond me.
If the laws did exist, they would require data centres to be aware of the content which is hosted and promptly remove clients if the law is violated. No, this isn't "snooping" or an infringement on your "free speech" - in fact, these measures ensure that free speech flourishes while removing the illegal garbage.
Now, once again, is the rebuttal of "but the government uses laws to unfairly censor people" - so then are you all for not having any laws? We have laws, they work - even though governments have abused them. But the answer is not to stop having laws.
There's a pretty enormous incentive to censor the internet.
As an example, Russia is threatening to ban Twitter completely citing child pornography laws[1]. It's pretty straightforward how a law like this gets abused. I think the question is, do you trust governments enough to give them the power to censor the internet?
And we need police and courts to apply those laws, not power hungry politicians and media giants.
There certainly exist content so bad that I want it off the Internet, but I do not want that to be used as an excuse to let those who are already powerful act as judge, jury and executioner.
Serious question. When are laws too many? (According to some history, 10 laws were too many and most people were ignoring them.)
Are a trillion laws too many? A billion? A million? A thousand? What if we had a thousand laws, but each law had a million pages?
(I'm pretty sure we're at over a billion pages of laws if we take into account all the laws in the world - as multinational companies are supposed to do.)
Never? Counting laws is an exercise of futility. Content, not numbers should matter. If it takes a billion small laws to cover everything needed, so be it, who cares?
Now nobody can understand the law,and everybkdy's committing 100 crimes a day; the legal system just prosecutes selectively anyone who sticks out. Great job.
Free speech is important as you state so yourself.
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand one of the most important WHY of the "digital free speech" argument.
Technologically the state can't enforce it. So if you get your wish you made a law that only spies on law-abiding citizens.
In your plea we can simply start here:
"data centres to be aware of the content which is hosted"
Is the datacenter responsible for the content MyImages.rar? What if its password protected? What if everybody knows the password?
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Any 'techinical' solution will require extremely complex infrastructure, laws, and safeguards. A never ending bureaucratic nightmare of "does this cross the line"? and it only force the bad guys to throw the needle in a different hay stack. ( And make it more difficult for the government hackers to watch the bad guys )
Simply mandate the rules, hunt down any data centers that don't follow them, and ban ISPs from providing them internet.
This pushes all of the mainstream providers into compliance. At that point you get specialist criminal providers, which you can target with much more prejudice.
This is a strange hit piece. Ecatel does not seek to serve CP distributors, too much trouble for very little money. The issue is that CP distributors are attracted to Ecatel because they're friendly to other controversial content.
Really law enforcement is to blame for not arresting these CP distributors causing trouble for Ecatel.
Ecatel doesn't protect criminals, I've been the subject of an investigation which involved servers there and they did everything the police asked of them.
239 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadI blame the regulators for not having the foresight to codify into some law that would prevent this situation.
In my opinion this is quite a good thing, considering this would ditribute the datacenters more across the netherlands.
"We think people should use renewable energy!"
"Oh no, we didn't mean them!"
It would have been airport security that made him throw it away, not customs. At that time, the UK was part of the customs union, so there were no customs on a flight between the Netherlands and UK.
Edit: as hand-luggage
Odd, as in the US, there is no limit if in your checked baggage if below 24% ABV, and 5 liters if 24% - 70% (carry on has much stricter limits [3.4oz or less that can fit comfortably in one quart-sized, clear, zip-top bag], but is still permitted).
https://www.tsa.gov/blog/2019/06/21/tsa-travel-tip-traveling...
You're not allowed to open the bag on the flight, obviously.
The duty free is inside the secure area, you've already passed security.
they were correct, the international arrivals required another bag check to enter the domestic part of the airport, that had the stringent TSA rules (after you went through customs and collected your luggage, before you could drop your luggage off again for your next flight).
so, it appears to be airport by airport when traveling to the US.
Not doubting your experience because policies change, but every US airport I've flown into has customs and immigration after an international flight, and after re-checking in your hold baggage if you have any, virtually all then route you to the normal TSA check before a domestic flight unless there's an airside transfer option directly to the gates.
at this point, you could no longer have anything in your checked baggage that could not go through standard TSA security, as you were already inside the secured area. some airlines (Alaska, for instance) allowed you to check your baggage PAST that security area, but you still had to make it past.
since you had already picked up your checked baggage, and no longer could get to any connecting flights without either exiting the airport completely (far away from other flights), or going through security again with your luggage to continue to the monorail, you were pretty much screwed.
editing to add: there were a lot of very unhappy people who had their airline provided or purchased past security water bottles being taken away before they could continue to their domestic flights. I have no clue exactly how far I would have had to walk outside of security to get to the domestic terminal, but my flight was so soon that I would never have chanced it.
double editing to add that I've flown international through other airports and never had that type of experience other than through Seattle.
triple editing to note that even SEATAC seemed to think this was a mess and the new international arrivals terminal is due to open "soon".
B.S.
Before a flight, a highly paid (given what they do) security theather monkey tried to demand that I forfeit an expensive bottle.
Knowing full well how it works in most countries, where the loots are split at the end of the day, I said "watch this", chugged it down, and voluntarily surrendered the now empty bottle.
At least I enjoyed it partly!
Even if later I did throw up during the flight, I prefer being sick than my luxury bottle being stolen by a security theater monkey.
It was a smelly flight however. Sorry, plane ground! Sorry, seat neighbours!
But it was funny when the stewardess asked my why I was sick: I just told the truth, I was drunk! What was she going to do anyway? Throw me out of the first class and into the main cabin?
Or this woman who similarly risked death? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/25/woman-downs-wh...
> “She was rolling on the ground, shouting"
She needs to learn to hold her liquor better.
They’re....close but it isn’t the same.
In case you were asking literally: security are the people that make you throw out liquids due to bomb threats and check for weapons. Customs see you after the plane across a border and check that you didn’t bring anything that requires payment of border tax. If you do, they will make you pay the tax at the border before entry.
The Dutch hosting company doesn't obey US law. My god! Can you believe these assholes? Running a hosting company that just hosts, and doesn't snoop into what their customers are doing? And how dare they make enforcement agencies actually go through the required legal processes to enforce the law!
https://www.wipo.int/
Worked for WIPO as a consultant back in the 90s.
I'm sure these companies don't throwout local court summons, but a lot of copyright holders (or their agents) send out DMCA claims and don't follow through beyond that.
a “DMCA claim" isn’t really the issue, the DMCA safe harbor (takedowns aren’t a basis for claims, but for safe harbor from claims against the provider) doesn’t apply outside of US law. To the extent another jurisdiction has provider liability, following US DMCA takedown rules won't protect you from it.
This is less obvious than it might appear - the US has pushed to include DMCA-equivalent claims in international trade deals.
E.g. The proposed UK-US Free Trade Agreement explicitly includes negotiation around intellectual property rights: https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/Summary_of_U.S.-UK_Nego...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Of course some will claim that provisions exist for damages to be claimed in the event of false takedowns, but it is hard if not impossible to collect. Typically you need to provide all of your personal data to respond.
I know of some people who basically finance their niche bulletin boards via police requests - they get something in the range of 2-3 digits (€) for a information request. Get a few of these a year and your hosting costs are paid.
There's not a lot of money to be made but if it's your hobby anyways..
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2706
"...this title shall pay to the person or entity assembling or providing such information a fee for reimbursement for such costs as are reasonably necessary and which have been directly incurred in searching for, assembling, reproducing, or otherwise providing such information."
Not your lawyer. Just providing a link to an example law describing how some ISPs can profit from data requests.
I remember uploading a BF3 montage on YouTube some eons ago when it was all the rage, no copyrighted music or anything. I received a DMCA claim by some spanish tv/broadcasting company or something along those lines, totally unrelated to my content.
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The fact that DMCA claims can be issued with no human interaction and no repurcussions is beyond me. If anything, the hosting company should at least issue penalties on false claims.
If penalties are issued by the hosting company, then they just won't be paid. Then you lose: there's no way to take all the non-paying offenders to court, and you can't ignore subsequent requests, so you wind up in the same situation as you're in now.
Instead, move the onus off the hosting company: if they receive from some entity a DMCA takedown that is believed to be false (according to whatever standards are applied to counterclaims), then no further takedown notices from that entity are required to be obeyed until the entity takes appropriate remedial action.
There are no standards for counterclaims except format standards. All a counterclaim does is permit undoing a takedown without the provider being liable, transferring determination of who is right to litigation between the purported copyright owner and the content uploader with the host fully immunized.
> A DMCA claim (or takedown) is when a copyright holder notifies a service provider that they have infringing material on their site/service. It is also known as a “Notification of Infringement”. For example, Twitch has these guidelines for submitting DMCA claims. Essentially it boils down to send in writing who you are, who is infringing your rights, how they’re doing it, and swear under penalty of perjury that you are telling the truth.
https://blog.pretzel.rocks/lets-take-a-minute-to-talk-about-...
I mean, there is no getting around it if you want the countersuit to work and reflect poorly on the claimant, but you are agreeing to letting the U.S. have extra-territorial jurisdiction.
If the falsity is only in regard to the not-under-perjury parts of a takedown notice (like, say, that there is infringing content!), then you maybe, in some circumstances, have a tortious interference claim, but, generally, you are screwed. If you are lucky, your host has and follows a counternotice process and you can get the material back up, but recovering any damages is unlikely.
> For reasons that are unclear, the web form that the two men drew up for reporting gruesome images is designed in such a way that the system can only handle five reports an hour. That is unworkable, according to the hotline.
But feel free to bury your hand in the sand.
The age of consent is 18 in Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
It is 17 in Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New York, and Texas.
It is 16 in the other 33 states and in the District of Columbia.
> I might care more once laws start protecting children from those in power more than used by those in power as a ploy to dismantle privacy from ordinary people.
In response to a thread comment regarding to the said hosting provider making it purposely difficult to report such matters...
The link between hosting child porn and child protection is much more subject to argument. I'd suggest it is banned because enough people suspect the link to be there, not because of any certainty.
It is unfortunately common for terrible ideas to be shepherded in under the pretence of thinking about the children. There needs to be debate about costs and benefits of this stuff beyond the crystal clear parts. It isn't reasonable to just assume someone doesn't care about protecting children just because they're willing to host anything. Although in this case they are being rather disrespectful to the people who use the form and that doesn't sit well with me.
Is there anything in the article indicating that child porn policies are being used to reduce ordinary people's privacy? From the article it sounds like they just want the child porn taken down, not any details about anyone.
Chucking a DMCA in the trash sounds like it's against Dutch law
On that matter though, here's what copyright.gov has to say:
"There is no such thing as an “international copyright” that will automatically protect an author’s writings throughout the world. Protection against unauthorized use in a particular country depends on the national laws of that country."
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ38a.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
To use a claim for any purpose other than enforcing your own copyrights (since 'illegal images' is such a broad term) is illegal in of itself.
The DMCA itself has no jurisdiction outside of the US regardless of the person accessing the data is within the US.
In order to submit a DMCA claim, one has to do so under the penalty of perjury.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
>(vi)A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
A DMCA claim isn't a "notification of illegal images." It is a statement of "I own the (copy)rights to this work and you do not have permission to host/use it."
Like can a child pornographer sue someone for pirating their content? Sounds absurd to me.
That reminds me a lot of the saga of Kim Dotcom
I don't know about death threats though. But I for sure would feel intimidated as hell.
OP did not claim that, OP claimed letter bombs and death threats. I ask for a source on that, and you provide a link which does not deliver at all.
https://www.gelderlander.nl/nijmegen/huub-bellemakers-gl-wor...
Rumoured letter bombs were around new years (Cobras). They were rumours, mind - it's not like they've made specific claims.
So are you backtracking on the letter bombs? They were merely rumors?
That's the whole point of being an anarchist.
I am not pro Vizier op Links, but I welcome the balance.
Does that mean “CP is hosted disproportionately in the Netherlands” or “CP hosted in the Netherlands is disproportionately likely to be discovered”?
Uncovering sources of CP is done pretty much equally for all countries considering the nature of the distribution of content and how it is uncovered and traced back.
Here's an article describing the procedure and how the statistic was calculated: https://www.tellerreport.com/life/--why-is-there-so-much-chi...
> "In 2018, slightly more than 200,000 links with possible child pornography were investigated," explains Wido Potters of industry organization ISPConnect Netherlands. "Of the reports that ultimately concerned child pornography, 80 percent were on an image board."
These have been listened to, and a campaign to undermine criminality by law enforcement has been setup with moderate success. The issue is known in government and action is being taken. At the same time, our value and expertise is largely in logistics. Government tries to balance economic interests against crime fighting.
Meanwhile we are a huge logistics hub with a relatively small police force (cause we are a small country). So it makes sense that we are attractive for criminals.
What worries me most is the port of Rotterdam. It is big, vital, and known to have quite a large criminal element embedded in the workforce. Fixing that whilst keeping the port operational is probably quite difficult.
A pristine record with whom?
I've worked for several years, on and off, in the Netherlands (and enjoyed doing so, mostly), and it has always seemed to me that they simply ignore any crimes and corruption they can't be bothered with.
There are drug labs basically everywhere in the countryside.
All global organized crime syndicates have a local presence.
With regards to prostitution, human trafficking has actually increased and prostitutes get imported and pimped out. Half the business is legal so the police have even less incentive to care, especially if the victim and the pimp are both foreign. Basically free tax money and no harm (to ethnic Dutch people).
There's also lots of arms trafficking.
Note: Since 2020 there have been some minor experiments with letting municipalities grow cannabis.
Law enforcement must go after the person who rented the server. That is the source of the problem. Going after the hoster is nothing but symptom relief.
What good does forcing a hoster to police their content? Do you think child porn will suddenly not exist anymore? Do you think child porn producer think "oh no, my website was taken down. Oh well I better stop doing this and get a stand up job."
Hosting companies take responsibility, because they knowingly and willingly host content that's beyond the jurisdiction of the company's country's legislature. It can't be that a string of copper wire across a border is enough to remove liability.
Lets not forget about camera manufacturers either, they're the real villains here.
Compare it to having acne. It's not recommended to pop the abscesses because it does nothing to treat the underlying issue and a week later you have them again. What you need to do is treat the underlying condition. Attacking hosters for hosting child porn is the same thing as popping acne ascesses. Sure you have taken down a few servers. But next week they will be back. It's just not effective. What you need to do is find the people that are making and spreading child porn.
> What you need to do is find the people that are making and spreading child porn.
They're somewhere too corrupt to care.
This is hilarious, I wish less sketchy companies would do this to DMCA requests.
> If the companies that give IP Volume access to the rest of the internet were all to decide to stop doing so, the company could no longer operate on the internet. This is called de-peering, and it does occur very sporadically.
> But it is highly controversial, says Guilmette. It flies in the face of the voluntary, decentralised structure of the internet. That is why the largest hub, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, say they won’t do it. A spokesman for the exchange: „We are only a highway, we have nothing to do with the content. You surely can’t expect us to paternalistically review what such a party is hosting?”
It's like youtube saying that they're simply "a highway" for video hosting. If it's moving through your platform, you have to be aware of what it is. There are police monitoring highways, there is extensive monitoring on youtube, so why is AIM pretending that the same rules don't apply?
Its like saying the postman most open, read and understand every piece of mail before delivering it, and the police must search inside every car before it may drive on the road.
Be polite.
they are just storing atoms. the storage company should not have to care about what configurations the atoms can exist in.
Seriously what is wrong with you? I get that cryto-anarchist are hip and think they're so cool, but there is a real human cost here. Are you OK with that?
The argument is exactly the same as the argument for not banning alcohol, decriminalizing drugs etc. Fight against actual crime instead of wasting resources on ineffective measures that look "morally right".
Right. Because those images were just created magically? Someone took them. And there's a market for them.
If there's no market for such pictures, likely less children will suffer the consequences.
Fighting the crime directly is important, but so is doing it indirectly.
Read about the suicide rates in the UK by women before and after the country changed the type of gas stoves. Indirect effects can be very strong.
Reconsider your morals and logic.
The market will always exist: pedophiles. They have been and will be among us until the end of times.
> Fighting the crime directly is important, but so is doing it indirectly.
Yes, but the difference is so abysmal that you know where is more important to put the effort. Stopping even 1 child of being abused is better than stopping the sharing of 1 million child porn pics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_International_child_porno...
I am not assuming such a thing (where did you this idea I will never know).
The attempt to fight indirectly clearly had not succeeded so far. And most often is used as a pretext for introducing mechanisms that afterwards are used for censorship.
I don't advocate for one policy or another. In fact i'd be happy if i was wrong and the fight with numbers was actually useful, but logic tells that it isn't.
I'd bet you got something to hide..
No it doesn't.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you'd like to offer advice about HN moderation, breaking the site guidelines while doing so is unlikely to persuade.
have you talked to those children and asked whether or not they think publically displaying and selling images of their abuse is abuse?
I don't advocate for one policy or another. In fact i'd be happy if i was wrong and the fight with numbers was actually useful. But i am rather sceptical about it, because the only argument its supporters have is "think of the children, you monster!"
Disagree? I would love to see enablers/apologists put some skin in the game (pun intended) and start posting some of their favorite images of them getting abused. Let's see some of that philosophy in action!
The grandparent post said (abbreviating):
The parent post responded, saying that this is a flawed line of reasoning, because it (imo purposefully) glosses over an important distinction between hosting child porn and hosting most numbers: hope this helps you come to a decision on whether hosting child porn is bad or not!If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
"Playing opera on my stereo isn't a morality question, I'm just creating vibrations in the air, and I should not have to care what interpretations of those vibrations can exist when I play it at 4am with the dial cranked to 11"
can you see how playing semantic games to try to dodge responsibility for poor behavior can be irritating even in the best of circumstances?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
He also learned his lesson over a decade ago, and furthering that lesson unnecessarily as you have here borders on harassment.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26683670.
[1]: https://confidentialcomputing.io/
If you are, then there is something seriously wrong with you.
It's hard to pin it on them legally but they are still dicks doing dicky things, they know it and they do it on purpose, and there is no clear way to fight it.
Police and lawyers are powerless, due to red tape and limitations in the system. So it would seemingly follow that only those who don't rely on legal means of recourse can put a stop to them.
In other words: Batman. This is how you get Batman.
I doubt many here would defend the way the business is being run. But misguided attempts at regulating the internet at the legislative level gives rise to these kinds of problems in the market. I am sure many here are simply sick of seeing this play out again and again. Just like how drug prohibition gave rise to international drug cartels, internet content regulation gives rise to data centers that flaunt those rules.
"Grapperhaus instituted a number of measures. [...] Companies would have to respond to a notification from the child pornography hotline without discussion within 24 hours"
"In 2015, Ecatel became embroiled in a lengthy conflict with the Premier League in the UK over claims of illegal streaming of football matches over Ecatel’s network. Streams must be removed by court order within 20 minutes of a notification."
By that logic we should leave it up indefinitely?
I find it hard to say that even a full illegal football stream hurts more people than even a second of leaving child pornography up.
You probably don't want to continue hosting it as some visitors to your website might leave your site or it may cause PR issues if you keep it up.
>than even a second of leaving child pornography up
There is no harm do doing that. Child porn is a single internet search away and people into that kind of stuff probably already have those kind of sites bookmarked. A few random visitors seeing those kind of images is not going to hurt anyone. A full illegal stream is a potential lost sale where a second of child porn doesn't really do much since there already exist many free alternatives on the internet.
I also gave reasons why it would be in your best interest to remove the images even if you had immunity from the legal problems from doing so. It's similar how you might not want to host gore.
If you go off the number of agents prosecuted for it, the FBI crime labs wholesale invention and fraudulent presentation of fiber “science” in both its own and, as a service provided to states, state prosecutions leading to numerous convictions and at least three executions grounded in state-agent perjury victimized zero people, too.
Law enforcement tends not to hold its own agents accountable for victimizing people, an issue which some particularly-victimized communities have made some high-profile complaints about over the last few years.
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/midwest/2011/05/23/199...
Both of these statements are not correct for a large sum of both types of content. The proof is incredibly easy to show.
> In the UK, ISPs are legally forced to block certain types of websites, such as those hosting copyright-infringing or trademarked content. Some ISPs also block other sites at their discretion, such as those that show extremist content, adult images, and child pornography. These latter blocks are voluntary and are not the same across the UK, but most ISPs usually tend to block child abuse content.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/uk-isp-group-names-mozilla-int...
> Grapperhaus instituted a number of measures. A technical system for detecting child pornography – a hashcheckserver – would be set up that hosting companies could join.
The laws in the Netherlands need to be updated to ensure that data hosting centres and their owners can't get away with criminal negligence.
And to everyone complaining about this with a "but my free speech" excuse - there are extensive legal procedures which ensure that allegations of criminal negligence are conducted openly and fairly.
How the Netherlands managed to avoid creating criminal negligence laws for these scenarios is beyond me.
If the laws did exist, they would require data centres to be aware of the content which is hosted and promptly remove clients if the law is violated. No, this isn't "snooping" or an infringement on your "free speech" - in fact, these measures ensure that free speech flourishes while removing the illegal garbage.
Now, once again, is the rebuttal of "but the government uses laws to unfairly censor people" - so then are you all for not having any laws? We have laws, they work - even though governments have abused them. But the answer is not to stop having laws.
As an example, Russia is threatening to ban Twitter completely citing child pornography laws[1]. It's pretty straightforward how a law like this gets abused. I think the question is, do you trust governments enough to give them the power to censor the internet?
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/russia-threaten-block-twitter-726...
And we need police and courts to apply those laws, not power hungry politicians and media giants.
There certainly exist content so bad that I want it off the Internet, but I do not want that to be used as an excuse to let those who are already powerful act as judge, jury and executioner.
Why?
Serious question. When are laws too many? (According to some history, 10 laws were too many and most people were ignoring them.)
Are a trillion laws too many? A billion? A million? A thousand? What if we had a thousand laws, but each law had a million pages?
(I'm pretty sure we're at over a billion pages of laws if we take into account all the laws in the world - as multinational companies are supposed to do.)
When, exactly, should we say "this is excessive"?
Technologically the state can't enforce it. So if you get your wish you made a law that only spies on law-abiding citizens.
In your plea we can simply start here:
"data centres to be aware of the content which is hosted"
Is the datacenter responsible for the content MyImages.rar? What if its password protected? What if everybody knows the password?
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Any 'techinical' solution will require extremely complex infrastructure, laws, and safeguards. A never ending bureaucratic nightmare of "does this cross the line"? and it only force the bad guys to throw the needle in a different hay stack. ( And make it more difficult for the government hackers to watch the bad guys )
This pushes all of the mainstream providers into compliance. At that point you get specialist criminal providers, which you can target with much more prejudice.
Really law enforcement is to blame for not arresting these CP distributors causing trouble for Ecatel.
Ecatel doesn't protect criminals, I've been the subject of an investigation which involved servers there and they did everything the police asked of them.