zlacker

>>pimter+(OP)
I kind of get both sides here. If we take the "see the best of others intentions" then a web that is populated by identified humans (and their authorised proxies!) is likely to be the "cleanest", most ideal web space we can see (a web full of sock puppets and link farms is not ideal).

The clearest end point for this is some government issued digital ID that just asserts who you are, acts as a login etc.

You can see this as a stepping stone to there. if you squint.

Is it the idealism of the 70s coke to life? No. Is it some sane compromise - I think so.

What if we cannot trust our government ? Sorry it is pretty sure that no internet is going to solve that. That's on the real world.

>>lifeis+z4
> web that is populated by identified humans

This is not going to work. The governments will create millions of fake identities to spread their propaganda, same way as they are making fake passports for spies.

>>codedo+cc
But websites don't care about government-issued IDs. They have their own IDs, and to create those you have to fill out a form. If the form is successfully rate limited then the cost and speed at which fake IDs can be created gets prohibitive even for governments, unless you think they only need a small number of accounts.

>>mike_h+Ie
You don't think the governments will force Apple, Google, etc to attest their things? I mean, they made them provide access to their firehose of data so they could mine it for metadata...

>>freedo+7m
We're talking about the same Apple that's currently threatening to yank some of its most popular products from the UK rather than disable e2e encryption? The same Google that reacted to the Snowden memos by putting the entire engineering division in an encryption Code Red, such that inter-dc links were almost fully encrypted just a few weeks later?

And that's for morally ambiguous cases where the justification is popular and well established things like crime fighting, child porn and so on.

We don't know what will happen in future, but given the story so far, the chances of these companies saying to governments, sure, have 500,000 free accounts so you can spam our users with incompetent political propaganda, is virtually zero.

>>mike_h+gp
Yes, we're talking about the same Google that only reacted that way to PRISM when a leaker blew the whistle (do we need to wait/hope for a whistle blower for every government thing they comply with?). The same Apple that moved the data for all Chinese customers to data centers where the CCP can access/monitor them. The same Apple that censors/filters the app store for Chinese users to enforce government policies.

The chances that they would comply with future government requirements cannot possibly be "virtually zero."

>>freedo+bw
China is kinda irrelevant here because western social networks and services are blocked there anyway, so the Chinese government can indeed compel Chinese companies to spam users with political propaganda (and does), but western companies are irrelevant in that process.

For Google and PRISM, I'm sure it won't change your mind, but I worked there at the time and the reaction was genuine. If there were people inside the firm who knew about it at all it must have been a very small group of spies/double agents, and such people were never detected despite a thorough search. Given that it was all based on fiber taps done by telcos though, it's not clear why they'd need any insiders. The assumption of formal cooperation was based on the phrasing of one or two sentences in some leaked documents, but the way the whole thing was set up didn't actually require it so, what those insiders would have been doing was a bit unclear.

Anyway, this is all by the by. We can't know what will happen in future. But if they won't budge on E2E encryption then it seems unlikely they'd be willing to bypass anti-spam measures, which is far more detectable, far less justifiable, and probably doesn't fit within any existing laws.