Yeah for example 8chan and kiwifarms are usually censored. I'm not that mad about it, some censorship is always necessary (you don't want links to child porn), but it's weird that Wikipedia pretends there is no censorship. And it's kind of arbitrary.
Why is stormfront - an openly nazi forum (a really old one at that) - allowed, but kiwifarms - an anti-trans doxxing forum - isn't? It's both bad
Do they pretend there's no censorship? I don't see that. They block spam and I'm certain no one objects to that, so the bare fact that they exclude some information clearly does not constitute the status "censored"
I'd imagine the reason kiwifarms gets different treatment is because the site is a lot worse than the descriptor "anti-trans doxxing forum" might make you believe — it's a website designed specifically to facilitate long term stalking and harassment campaigns. Trans people are their flavour of the month right now but a few years ago it was anyone disabled.
Yes, they do. Censorship of official links is against explicit Wikipedia policy[1], but it doesn't matter because every policy can be overridden by consensus. In practice this means that a handful of professional activists can (and do) censor it as they see fit, since they can determine for themselves whether such a "consensus" exists.
The Mediawiki environment became increasingly hostile to "the external world" though.
I am making a research project on grammatical gender in French, that I host on Wikiversity (there is a dedicated research space there). Lately I get an increasingly large number of rejection of saving my contributions, because some sites are considered "unreliable sources". But in my project, I am looking to document what people use in practice in their written exchanges. That they express lies or try to spread disinformation is irrelevant from the linguistic perspective I’m conducting this project. But due to this software enforced policy, I get prevented from documenting my sources from time to time.
> If they're spreading disinformation, obviously they also aren't accurately representing their own speech patterns.
But GP is not documenting the 'true' speech patterns of the people spreading the disinformation, but rather the speech patterns they use when they are spreading disinformation (which, as you pointed out, might be different from their normal speech pattern). So the sources are still good enough for that.
> If you had actually read the thread you'd know that it's Wikipedia policy not to include links to sites containg content illegal in the US because that can actually get visitors in trouble.
Not really though.
They have WP:ELNO which includes this, but that excludes WP:ELOFFICIAL. Official links are exception to that list.
> "These links are normally exempt from the links normally to be avoided, but they are not exempt from the restrictions on linking"
The only things that are restricted for official pages is what is in WP:ELNEVER
> 1. Policy: material that violates the copyrights of others per contributors' rights and obligations should not be linked, whether in an external-links section or in a citation.[a] External links to websites that display copyrighted works are acceptable as long as the website is manifestly run, maintained or owned by the copyright owner; the owner has licensed the content in a way that allows the website to use it; or the website uses the work in a way compliant with fair use. Knowingly directing others to material that violates copyright might be considered contributory copyright infringement.[c] If there is reason to believe that a website has a copy of a work in violation of its copyright, do not link to it. Linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else's work casts a bad light on Wikipedia and its editors. This is particularly relevant when linking to sites such as Scribd, WikiLeaks, or YouTube, where due care should be taken to avoid linking to material that violates copyright.
> 2. Technical: sites that match the Wikipedia-specific or multi-site blacklist without being whitelisted. Edits containing such links are automatically blocked from being saved.
According to wikipedia's own official policies, links to 8chan and kiwifarms should be allowed as official links, as Stormfront and The Daily Stormer is, as they don't break copyright and are not on spam blacklists.
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again my problem is not censorship (I am for that), it's just that wikipedia acts like it isn't happening and cannot make an official ruleset that they follow.
There's not a strong differentiation between "official" policies and guidelines and "unofficial" specific consensus on Wikipedia. Individual arguments are generally built out of policy and policy is just longer-standing consensus and can be changed. It's not like there's a different group of editors setting policy from those who argue on talk pages.
Wikipedia acting like it's not censorship is the standard method in which censorship happens in the west today. The people in charge here gloat and applaud the idea of democracy and freedom of speech, while they use dishonest tactics to censorship.
Here's the old joke:
> A Russian and an American get on a plane in Moscow and get to talking.
> The Russian says he works for the Kremlin and he's on his way to go learn American propaganda techniques.
> "What American propaganda techniques?" asks the American.
If there is some official policy which links are allowed and which are not, I'll shut up.
Why are some links allowed and some not, what is the policy, if there is some.
I see
> Wikimedia projects are not censored. Some kinds of content, particularly that of a sexual, violent or religious nature, may be offensive to some viewers; and some viewers may feel such content is disrespectful or inappropriate for themselves, their families or their students, while others may find it acceptable.
I'm a bit annoyed by it. Censoring "lawful but awful" speech is the thin edge of the wedge. An existing precedent of censoring legal websites reduces my confidence that Wikipedia will be able to stand up to censorship pressure (including from its own editors) in the future.
So called "lawful and fine" speech don't need free speech protections, nor any protections for that matter. It's precisely the so called "lawful but awful" speech that do.
I think the argument in this case is that it may cross the line into unlawful behavior. Kiwifarms has been linked to suicides, and encouraging suicide is a crime. 8chan has similarly been linked to violent crimes.
There are cases where speech is illegal, even in the USA, which probably has the strictest standards for protecting speech in the world.
If you think a website is doing something illegal, you can report it to the police or the FBI, depending on what type of crime it is. Kiwifarms has a US corporate entity controlled by a US citizen, it isn't like this is some tor darknet market hosted in Moldova or something.
Generally though sites aren't responsible for their users' speech, so if someone does cross the line, that would be on the user, not the site. As long as the site responds to any lawful subpoenas, they would stay in the clear.
So if a person advocates (for example) murder on an American site, this is fine until the police say it isn't? That is not a standard that 99% of the internet follows, and for good reasons.
The US legal system is 100% wholly incapable of keeping up with the pace of internet content for this sort of thing, so embracing the spirit of the laws on speech and applying them within user-content-based-sites is an appropriate minimum.
Even Musk who wanted to turn Twitter into a site dedicated to free speech specifically said he wanted to focus primarily on moderating content based on US laws (something that he has apparently walked back since then since Twitter still aggressively moderates legal content).
That's the whole point of Section 230. Service providers generally have immunity with respect to third-party content posted by their users. If a user posts something, it's their speech, and the user is therefore held responsible for it, not the website. Section 230 is what makes an internet of user-generated content possible.
> Sure, the Klan has some bad hombres, but we also run Checkers Tuesdays, maths tutoring for underprivileged youths Friday mornings, and Bible study Sundays.
That is, at some point, the bad overwhelms any good.
And sometimes the good is used to spread the bad, or the whole. Cults sometimes recruit like this, abusive people can be nice at first, narcissistic traited particularly, violent fringe groups offer camaraderie, yakuza doing charity and relief supplies. So I agree 100% that it really matters where the good is coming from.
I agree, Kiwifarms is much more shitty than that. To quote from Wikipedia "It now hosts threads targeting many individuals, including minorities, women, LGBT people, neurodivergent people, people considered by Kiwi Farms users to be mentally ill or sexually deviant, feminists, journalists, Internet celebrities, and video game or comics hobbyists."
Do you see the irony in quoting Wikipedia's view of a site to show that Wikipedia's stance on not linking that site is OK, in a discussion about how Wikipedia is censored? Have you actually looked for yourself instead of just trusting the propaganda?
I find it very disturbing that the Wikipedia thread posted in the post above discusses the topic like it's about CP. It's clearly not. It's completely about the political implications of 8ch, especially in the aftermath of the connection between the Christchurch shooting by Brenton Tarrant.
I have browsed 8ch extensively in the past, and continue to browse 4chan. You'll be exposed to disgusting imagery from time to time, no doubt, but the idea that 8ch is censored because of illegal and disgusting imagery is so incredibly disingenuous, this is clearly about political censorship of right wing extremism.
If I had a bit less faith in humanity I would even go as far as to suggest that the Wikipedia thread is crafted to be about CP and not politics for the sake of justifying censorship and rewriting history. 8ch was not controversial because of CP, it was controversial because of extremist politics, and attempting to rewrite history like this is just so typical of Wikipedians these days.
>Google appears to have taken an unprecedented step in filtering its search results by banning an entire domain—and adding a warning about __"suspected child abuse content"__ to a search for the domain itself.
the guy who made it said that he found it reprehensible but wouldn't remove it, so yes promoted pedohilia by turning a blind eye in the name of "free speech"
And the reason why they're even having the discussion is not because the site might contain CP. The reason they're having the discussion is because the board was host to a political discussion board which hosted right wing extremists, and various kind of censors in the west don't think these people should be able to act freely on the internet.
My friend worked in Vietnam and Laos for several years. Every company had to hire a communist party member on staff who rarely showed up. When they did they would demand everyone go drinking, paid for by the company.
A friend's fintech company in Vietnam (it's one that you know) was pretty much told to make room in the C-suite for a very well connected family member to the Northern power brokers. I agree there is no requirement to have a Communist Party member join the company, but someone with connections? Sure.
It matters whether it's a local versus foreign company. If it's run by Vietnamese (or Viet Kieu) or run by foreigners. It mostly depends on how much money is involved, as a small local business is small potatoes, but when you're talking about the companies raising $100M USD in a round, it starts to matter a lot.
And my friend's company wasn't exactly opposed to it, since it's a symbiotic relationship. Have a problem with getting a license? Having "that guy" call his uncle who sits on the regulatory body can expedite it. Of course, you have to share in the wealth so sweetheart investment deals get offered in return.
He told me you can't make it big (think the equivalent of Stripe in the US) without those connections because if you don't, your competitor will and suddenly you'll find that permit you were told would take 3 months has been "delayed".
Anyone who tries to get government approval for things like licenses, etc knows it's a painful process even for the routine stuff. Now image trying to do something "different". The usual response is "you can't do that". The system is pretty much set up to require a back channel to the people in the government who can make or break a company.
Yes, it’s amazing how naive HN is when it comes to these things. This place is super useful for technical knowledge but insanely useless when it comes to situations where lived experience differs from “official” ways the world (is supposed to) work.
> you can't make it big (think the equivalent of Stripe in the US)
Hehe. We might be 2nd or 3rd degree connects. Are they that fintech HQed near the crescent mall?
> The system is pretty much set up to require a back channel to the people in the government who can make or break a company
Exactly. Welcome to "emerging markets"
> when you're talking about the companies raising $100M USD in a round, it starts to matter a lot
Lower rounds too. Big reason I got spooked by the VN scene. It's exactly the same kinda shit you'd deal with in China, India, or Indonesia, but way less RoI.
Kinda sad honestly, there is a lot of talent, but leadership and policymakers there don't have the breadth needed to make the next Thailand or Malaysia (despite having the right fundamentals).
If they can attract the successful 2nd and 3rd gen Viet Kieus in the US, Canada, and Australia (the Harvard, UCLA, UNSW, UToronto grads) at the policy level, I think there is a lot of potential.
He worked at a few large companies with offices, and this is what he told me. Maybe you need to be big and legacy with a physical footprint. But this is what he told me. He has a lot of very interesting anecdotes. For example in Laos if you impregnate a woman as a foreigner, you have to marry her, under penalty of death. So his girlfriends were always trying to mess with his condoms, try to get him to have unprotected sex, and various oddities. So he claimed
> Relationships with Lao citizens: Lao law prohibits cohabitation or sexual contact between foreign citizens and Lao nationals except when the two parties have been married in accordance with Lao Family Law. Any foreigner who cohabitates with or enters into a sexual relationship with a Lao national risks being interrogated, detained, arrested, or fined. Foreigners are not permitted to invite Lao nationals of the opposite sex to their hotel rooms, and police may raid hotel rooms without notice or consent. Foreigners, including U.S. citizens of Lao descent, are not allowed to stay in the homes of Lao nationals, even family, without the prior consent of the village chief and local police.
From what I've seen in south korea recently, that is pretty chill if all they want to do is go to KTV and drink.
Samsung was forced to hire a bunch of "socialist leaning/political victims" who wants to nationalize the company and turn it into their piggy bank (this will most likely happen after recent election results)
You're yelling at the sky. All these HNers don't even know about To Lam's whole Saltbae scandal and how he still remains on top, let alone all the other grafts and political insider shit that happens.
Some people here do pay bribes. I do not. Neither do most people around my age that I know.
I immigrated here 12 years ago. I have a company license, a driving license, proper residency, and so on.
I got every last piece of it by filling out forms, and waiting a normal amount of time. I speak Vietnamese like a small child and have no Vietnamese heritage.
Perhaps some people will report something different, and perhaps they are also correct. However, this is my story.
We're Westerners so we're insulated from low level corruption because we can report to the Tourist Police and our local Consulate or Embassy, who will complain to that Quan's MPS.
The kind of low level corruption your mentioning impacts the working class or middle class (the kind living in a 1 bedroom apartment in D10 with a Honda motorbike) because they have no recourse.
That said, the mid-upper level corruption is very significant. How else do you see retired generals and senior party apparatchiks with a $50/mo pension eating steaks at the Landmark 81 and living in a villa in Thao Dien.
And this is why my SO makes it a principle to always speak in English so she doesn't get Vietnamese service.
> And this is why my SO makes it a principle to always speak in English so she doesn't get Vietnamese service.
That's a general recommendation for any overseas Vietnamese (Viet Kieu) to just pretend not to speak Vietnamese any time they interact with officials. They'll never get aggressive and will usually move onto easier prey.
But you are correct the low level corruption is common. A good story I heard was getting the household registration completed at the police station - bring in forms, call back "you forgot to sign this form", go back and sign the form, a couple weeks later you call "oh, it was actually the wrong form, come back", go back sign another form, a couple weeks later "it's not finished yet", a couple weeks later "you're missing one form".
Finally, they go in, finish that form and say "hey, you've been working hard, let me buy you a coffee" and you slip them the equivalent of $10 USD (about 20x the cost of a coffee). Poof, magic, it's done the next day and the cop will even swing by your home to drop off the paperwork.
A lot of the corruption is simply slow-rolling things until what the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act calls "facilitation payments" are made.
Back when my family built our house a few years ago, we had to pay some bribe for a local officer to get our construction permission, otherwise it will get delayed for who knows how long.
On paper, gov's officer's salary is <500usd a month, yet several provincial secretary own large houses and villas. Where does the money come from ?
You see this stuff reported once in a while in Vietnamese newspaper, and stuff that are not reported could be worse.
Amomg Vietnamese people, government's corruption is well known, happens at every level, and everybody I know is treating it as an open secret.
My very limited experience with Vietnam officials was that you could avoid bribes, but it was much more convenient to just bribe them.
I was going through the land border from Laos to Vietnam and was told to leave some "coffee money" in my passport on both sides of the border. I think it was either 20k or 50k Dong.
Apparently if you did not do this, you would get seen last and they would stamp it perfectly diagonally in the middle of a fresh passport page to try and ruin that page.
No idea if this was actually true because everyone just paid.
- Roughly the equivalent of an entire city losing their livelihood to one person
- The trauma and ruin people around the victims will feel
- Orphaned children, suicides, intragenerational trauma that will last for many rebirths.
It's the same cavalier attitude I see towards victims of SBF on this forum. "Its their fault", "they were asking for it".
You have compassion for the perpetrator but not the victims who are dead and are going to end up dead.
I only pray that you will not experience the pain of being manipulated and scammed. It's truly awful because I experienced it.
I know some religions/SF bay cults try to justify it but at the end of the day its the lapse in responsibility and compassion, the same disregard for others but your own.
I recognize that they’ve done a LOT of harm, but death is a harsh punishment under almost any circumstances. The death penalty seems like one of those ideological issues where people fall on one side or the other, and they pretty much stay on that side.
My perspective is: if the point is to dissuade people from committing crimes like this, it seems like a lengthy prison sentence would achieve the same thing. The harm has already been done, and killing them doesn’t fix anything. Death is just so damn final.
I'm sort of ambivalent about the death penalty, and I'm more than skeptical about punishment-based behavior mitigation in general.
That said, whatever the severity of penalty you assign to direct forms of (mass) murder ought to apply to the indirect forms when they're scaled up far enough.
Like, that capital represents the real possibility of avoiding starvation for a certain percent of the population (many of them children).
Similarly, I look at folks like the Sacklers and think that whatever we do to a school shooter ought to be done to them. They knew full well what the impact of their behavior was going to be and thought, "fuck 'em. Let 'em die". That's just as bad if not worse than a troubled teen picking up an assault rifle.
> I look at folks like the Sacklers and think that whatever we do to a school shooter ought to be done to them.
Sometimes I wonder why it’s mostly poor people who are executed in the US. One reason is, we don’t punish rich people crimes with the same severity. If you look at the list of capital crimes in e.g. California, most of them involve specific circumstances around single murders. It’s not hard to imagine white collar crimes which cause an order of magnitude more damage to society.
Whether these crimes need to be punished with the death penalty is a different question I think you and I would not agree on, but I would concede if it meant stricter punishments for white collar criminals. The Sacklers are far more evil than most of the men sitting on death row now.
If you’re rich, you can afford to confer with attorneys before, and afford pretty good defense attorneys afterwards. They also typically are major contributors to the community in some way (taxes, as an employer, etc.).
Poorer folks learn ‘the law’ from TV or their cousins or whatever, and often just get a public defender with an excessive case load. They typically don’t clean up well, and won’t come across well to a jury.
Who do you think the prosecutor is going to throw the book at to pad their resume?
I don’t doubt that wealthy people have access to better council, but my point is that (as far as I know) in the US, white collar crimes are literally not capital crimes. It’s not a matter of wealthy people being charged with capital crimes and escaping with great legal defense. White collar crimes are simply not treated with the same severity as directly murdering one person, even if the outcome was the same or even orders of magnitude worse.
There is also the fact that if you’re richer, you can probably afford to solve whatever problem you have without actually murdering someone. Especially not murdering them yourself.
Because you can hire lawyers. Or can afford friends in low places. Or have power and influence to get what you want through threats. And aren’t desperate enough (usually) either to consider it a good cost/risk trade off.
But not always, rich people can be crazy too. Or actually, I mean ‘eccentric’. Crazy is when someone is poor.
If you’re criminally inclined, getting more money is always ‘worthwhile’ though, especially since it’s rare anyone can look at it and say it should be punished the same as literal murder.
In banning the death penalty for rape, the US Supreme Court explicitly... in black letter text... left open the possibility of executing major drug traffickers. We should use that door more often.
Singapore is certainly an appealing model to a certain segment of the population. They have mandatory death penalty for drug traffickers. However, what most people don’t want to talk about is the robust social safety net that Singapore also has. In Singapore the police can arrest homeless people for sleeping on the streets. But they also have ample housing available for them. In San Francisco, there literally is no place for a homeless person but the streets. The waitlist can take months or years.
After decades of propaganda, far right media has convinced a large part of the American public that social welfare programs don’t work. Of course they did this after first defunding those social programs. So of course the only option left is punishment.
But if anything, the US “war on drugs” has only proven that punishment alone isn’t enough. Thankfully people are starting to wake up to that fact.
The problems with prohibition are well documented. There's a good reason we re-legalized alcohol, and we suffer those same problems with the current prohibitions (the creation of a multibillion-dollar organized crime market).
I think it's important that we define exactly what it is that we're trying to mitigate / accomplish with drug laws in general. If it's the reduction of harm, then we're going about it completely wrong.
The overwhelming majority of overdoses are from opioids [1] and yet we treat lsd, mdma, cocaine, and a whole slew of psychedelics exactly the same as heroin. There's evidence [2] that suggests that prescription opioids drive abuse behavior.
It's known that fentanyl adulteration drives a significant portion of OD deaths [3] even if it's hard to get good numbers on how many of these ODs are adulterated compounds vs just fentanyl because of how the numbers are reported. If we legalized everything but opioids, a significant portion of these ODs could be easily avoided.
The DEA has failed it's mandate, and it's time to disband them, end the prohibition, and focus on harm reduction techniques rather than incarceration. We could also spend a little more time reigning in "legitimate" organizations like Purdue Pharma, who cause unarguable harm in the guise of medicine.
It is harsh and meant to be, a message to all opponents and general population about strength of regime. All dictatorships do it regularly, iran, saudi arabia, russia etc.
Naw, the death penalty is much harsher penalty (seeing as how almost all death row inmates use every means possible to avoid it). Particularly so for white collar people who never thought they would be tied to a tree and shot 10 times in the heart. Just the thought of that happening can deter a lot of people, and even if it doesn't, it's what she deserves.
It’s always bad people who want to feel good who do these exercises imo to signal how “pure” they are to defend rapists, killers, corrupt fraudsters, etc.
I recently had a discussion with my partner about this and it was quite insightful as we fall on different ends of this spectrum. I do like the Scandinavian model of all life is precious and reforming criminals rather than punishing them. But she’s from india and the moral calculus is very different.
There are people who commit incredibly atrocious crimes, and then get away with a slap in the wrist. India _has_ the death penalty but it is very rarely enforces it. And according to her, the existence of it keeps people at least a little bit in check, as if they do something massively bad (killing swaths of people for example) they could face real punishment. Cause people with money can get away/live in comfort in prison quite successfully.
Also, poverty is so prevalent that there are plenty of people for whom prison would be a step up in comfort and living conditions from where they are.
As you’ve so eloquently put, we didn’t change each other’s positions but at least I understand much better now how some parts of the world could justify it.
It could have also been score settling, and her corruption (because they are all corrupt) was magnified to slaughter a chicken to scare the monkeys, so to speak.
Death should not be the highest form of punishment
You think it should? Then why stop there? What about death, but after weeks of gruesome torture? How many percentage points of an entire country's economy should warrant that?
You're also missing the point. I'm not in favor of the death penalty, but I'm also not Vietnamese, and I recognize that capital punishment is their highest form of punishment. On a scale of "the most lenient punishment" to "the highest form of punishment", this is obviously at the end of that spectrum. Whether or not I believe that's a good punishment is immaterial.
What does matter is that they chose, on that scale of least to most, the most. The actions of the accused surely have and will continue to lead to death (at that scale of fraud, the downstream consequences are going to be vast and devastating to the victims). If murderers can deserve the death penalty, the abstract consequences of someone committing physical violence are remarkably less bad than the abstract consequences of the criminals in this case, so why wouldn't the same be appropriate?
Separate from the issue of whether capital punishment is moral, it's on the table whether you or I like it. At what point is the maximum punishment appropriate?
The actual maintainers of the repo seem to take the position that all "Jia Tan" commits are backdoor-free unless proven otherwise, so most of his commits still stay (as they* did a LOT of actual, real work on the repo).
I am curious what people think about that. It's still around 30k lines of code made by a known malicious entity, looking at git blame. However it seems mostly fine?
Wanting to do something right is permission to do so in a world of standards but not in a world of free reference implementation in lieu of a standard.
I'm surprised that this implementation of xz written by... well... random people has been adopted so widely. I would've expected a more 'industrial' implementation managed by Google or Meta or something, but there isn't one.
I'm still baffled xz took off so massively in the first place. The USP seems to be existing LZMA compression but made significantly more fragile and prone to never decompressing again.
AirTags/Find My is THE reason why me and my whole family is on iOS.
This is great. I wanted my next phone to be Z Flip since Apple stopped making small iPhones (and no foldables in sight), but reliance on Find My stopped me.
You may want to watch some videos on the longevity of foldable screens, consensus is that they still don't hold up over time and become especially brittle after being exposed to cooler temperatures.
I can’t imagine anyone, even Apple, solving the issues of the screen being perfectly flat at the hinge. I don’t think it can be made to feel the same as the rest of the screen or have no visual difference either.
And I like my iPhone. If it was twice as thick and half as tall when folded, I just don’t see that as “better”.
If it was the same thickness as today when folded and half as thick when unfolded I’m not sure that’s better either (and would be harder to make anyway).
Folding phones seem like one of those neat things that can be made but don’t solve any problem most people have. It seems like it would be most useful to make something the size of a lipstick case that unfolds into something a bit wider. That would’ve been cool 20 years ago. But I don’t wanna phone that tiny these days.
Did the Jia Tan character actually committed something of value? Looking at the history, he had (there was some stuff with multithreaded compression/decompression); as he kept it in the original license, could it be used going forward?
Why is stormfront - an openly nazi forum (a really old one at that) - allowed, but kiwifarms - an anti-trans doxxing forum - isn't? It's both bad