Sunde understands the value of propaganda, so it's fairly obvious he expected this outcome. He wanted to highlight the undemocratic and corrupt nature of one of the most critical parts of our global infrastructure, and he did it.
Ironically, this was a better proof of transparency than what most "problematic" people would subject themselves to. If any vanilla oligarch wanted to be in those circles, he would just pay some squeaky-clean individual to be his stooge, and then make it known, after registration, who the real power is. Sunde could have configured himself as a freelance consultant to his friends, and he would not have appeared on any radar. This would have made his business work, but it would not have advanced the perennial conversation about ICANN's original sins, which have become more and more untolerable with the years.
ICANN were pretty stupid to just veto his admission. That's not how you deal with institutional critics. They could have simply brought him in, then informally and formally vetoed anything he wanted to do. They have experience with people who tried to blow up things "from inside" in the past, so clearly they've developed countermeasures ready for that scenario. Or they could have given him something, enough to behold him, so he'd have an incentive to stay in the tent and piss outside rather than the other way around.
This attitude proved Sunde is fundamentally right on the subject matter, like him or not as a person.
"They have experience with people who tried to blow up things "from inside" in the past, so clearly they've developed countermeasures ready for that scenario."
Who are some people who tried to "blow things up from inside"?
This sounds like it would make for an interesting HN discussion.
I vaguely recall a CEO they had who, after leaving, asked to see the books and was stymied.
You are probably thinking of Karl Auerbach. He was not CEO, but he was elected to the board when ICANN at least pretended to have a democratic element. Once he got in, he asked to see the books, which he was entitled to do; ICANN leadership refused, and the matter had to be settled through the courts, which took almost two years (and presumably, a chunk of ICANN cash for legal fees); Auerbach won. Around the same time, Andy Müller-Maguhn, journalist and CCC member was elected in the same role for the European region, and again started asking questions of transparency. ICANN leadership decided that this democracy thing had gone too far, and promptly eliminated publicly-elected members from its board (around 2002/2003, if i remember correctly).
He has been punished for his wrong doing, which had nothing to do with DNS. The least ICANN could do it tell Sunde exactly what they are affaird he’ll do to misuse an accreditation. Some one with an accreditation sold Sunde and team piratebay.org, so they can’t be worried that he’ll register a ton of pirate domains, he can easily get those elsewhere.
People shouldn’t be punished for life, especially not by excluding them from areas that are completely unrelated.
In the country I grew up in, the Netherlands, not only is that not common practice, it cannot happen at all. What we have is people can ask the Ministry of Justice for a "Verklaring Omtrent het Gedrag (VOG)", a declaration by the ministerial department that there are no relevant convictions that would get in the way of the job or role they are applying for. If you have no convictions, you get your VOG. If you have convictions but they are not relevant to the job or role you are applying for, you get the exact same VOG that you would if you have no convictions, so that there is no way for employers to know the difference. Your employer is not allowed to ask you directly about a criminal history (at least not in a job interview), they are only allowed to ask for a VOG. Yes, that means you can get a banking license with a criminal history, if the Ministry has decided that that criminal history is irrelevant. With a conviction for fraud, you won't get that license. With a conviction for assault, you might. That seems like a much fairer system to me and I wish more countries would adopt it.
I think the system in the Netherlands uses a lot more secrecy surrounding the courts systems. In those cases, secrecy is default.. SO having a bureaucratic branch dedicated to determining relevant convictions makes sense.
In the USA, came from the UK which was known (in the 1700's) for having secret trials, secret evidence, secret witnesses, and secret punishments. So the founders built this system to be transparent in many ways. And that meant public recording of crimes. Fast forward a few hundred years, and this computing thing takes off, and records everywhere are put in a system and easily searchable.
Having the secret system in place in the Netherlands and the transparent/easily searchable system in the USA don't really mix all to well.
(Admittedly, much of the courts systems are still opaque as mud, but some important parts are constitutional - like seeing/questioning witnesses, jury of your peers, etc)
Note that there is no secrecy during court proceedings in the Netherlands: court proceedings are ordinarily open to the public. There are exceptions for family affairs (such as divorces), tax affairs, and criminal cases against minors, but otherwise you are free to watch a court proceeding if you like. Source, in Dutch: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/rechtspraak-en-gesc... The only secrecy is after court proceedings, and even then, only as far as for the identities of the people are involved: court rulings are regularly published online at https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/, easily searchable, with just the names of people and identifying information redacted.
Two basic ideas come to mind. We want suspects not have their life destroyed if they are found not guilty. And after you have done your sentence, you should be free to have a normal life again.
For some people and some cases this is not possible. Sometimes there is a publicly known person involved, like the case of Keith Bakker which is in the Dutch news today. He has been a lot on TV in the past. Another case was the killing of Pim Fortuyn, a well-known politician, where everybody knows the name of the killer and he is now somewhat forced to live in another country. Mostly the news talk about Jos B. or similar semi-private namings. People closely involved know who it is about, but it doesn't need to be on TV or in the newspaper.
mpol already answered part of the design here about the need for privacy for the people involved; it is a balancing of priorities, both transparency in the judicial system and that privacy are important and this is a way of getting both.
About your other question though: one of the courts states in an answer to one of their frequently asked questions, https://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie-en-contact/Organisati..., that a copy of a verdict will always be anonymised. No suggestions are made for when you want to apply for an exception to that rule and I suspect it is not possible at all. I am also struggling to come up with a valid reason for such a request; if it is indeed impossible, that might not be a problem.
How do they handle requests to view information about court cases currently in progress?
Example: I own and live in a condo apartment in a housing complex where the legal entities for my building and four other buildings are all members of one overall legal entity for the complex. Some of the other legal entities, and some of their administrators, are currently suing the overall legal entity with various claims. The management notified all owners that this was happening, as they're required by law to do, but didn't give the full complaint. (They did name the individuals and legal entities who filed suit, including the administrator roles of the individuals.) I'd like to read the full details.
Where I live, I can go to the public library or the courthouse, search for the involved parties in a database, and read the specifics. I don't have to prove that I am indirectly a partial owner of the entity being sued (though I am); this is available to the general public.
How would this work in the Netherlands if public access is anonymized?
I imagine the reason your laws only requires a notification that a court case is happening, without details, is because all the information is already public anyway and you can look up anything you need, so I expect that if Dutch law has similar provisions, it would require more details to be shared with you. However, this is just guessing, I have no experience with this, sorry.
Though in this case the transparency is one-sided: ICANN can gather all manner of information on Sunde, but Sunde is denied any detailed explanation from ICANN on exactly why his application was denied. Just this rather opaque reason of them being "not comfortable" with him operating a domain registrar.
It's worth noting that in the UK, an applicants car minal background could easily be checked but the application process is only allowed to ask if you have any "outstanding" issues. The idea being that crimes you have served your time for, and those that happened in the past are usually not relevant and can keep ex convicts in low paying / criminal work if used to stop them gaining legitimate work.
In addition to that, most criminal convictions have a limitation on how long they count towards your VOG. In most cases they look back 4 years, 2 for younger people (till 23) There are exceptions like in transport (taxi/truck) and high integrity functions like lawyers and interpreters (10 years) and people convicted of sex offences (10 years or longer depending on the function).
There's a similar bug with the age of consent laws where I live. General gist of things is that the age of consent is 17, however if both participants are under 17 and the age gap is small (typically less than 1 year), there's an exception clause (I believe this is known as a "Romeo & Juliet" clause).
This leads to the odd scenario where someone born 16y364d ago can get it on with someone born 16y363d ago, then the very next day it becomes illegal, and the day after that it becomes legal again.
I'm reminded of the way health concerns are handled for pilots. As I understand it, you get your medical from an authorized doctor, and that certifies that in health terms you're fit for the job. Different roles require different levels of medical certificate. With that done, your employer has no business prying further regarding your health.
There's a lot of information on that at https://www.justis.nl/producten/vog/beoordeling-besluit-en-b..., too much to summarise here, but I'll just mention what it says at the end: if you aren't given your VOG when you believe you should be, it's possible to ask for that decision to be reviewed. If upon review you still aren't given your VOG, you can appeal that decision by taking it to court and having a judge look at it.
And what kind of results do they get? (I'm genuinely asking)
Any time I hear about a "you can apply for X" series of bureaucratic hoops one can jump though I can't help but wonder if it's like getting a building permit in SF or a handgun license in NYC where only the people who've made the right donations to the right people can get what they want and everyone else gets the bureaucratic run around.
As I remember it you submit a web form, pay 25 euro, then it's sent to you or your employer. Either way everyone can get one, no special hoops or donations required.
Yes I do. A Judge decided what was a fair punishment for the offense. They sat through an entire trial and made a decision about what was an appropriate sentencing.
Once that appropriate sentence has been serve there should be no further punishment. If the Judge decides the felon should never be able to work in banking they can, in most countries, make that happen.
What's the point of having a judicial system if everyone is going to take the matter in their own hands anyway?
In Czechia, you can ask the court to erase your criminal record. They usually comply after the same amount of years that was your original sentence. Meaning that after spending 3 years in prison, the criminal record stays with you further 3 years and after that if there is no reason to keep it and you ask for it, it gets erased.
Well, erased is not really exact. It won't be accessible by anyone and you will have the right to be treated as if you were never convicted.
So, Peter's original sentence was like 8 months? After so many years I believe nobody should hold his TPB involvement against him anymore.
> You don't want to give banking license to a convicted felon.
Why not? "Convicted felon" encompasses a lot. Being convicted of felony drug possession when you were 19, for example, has very little to do with one's ability or trustworthiness to run a bank.
Sure, maybe we don't give banking licenses to people who have committed financial crimes (though a lot of corrupt investment bank executives seem to have no problem doing business), but that's not the same thing.
This idea that committing a crime should lock people out of many life activities is one of the things that leads them to committing more crimes. The punishment was a fine or jail time; let's stop punishing people for the rest of their lives.
This was also the ACB take on Second Amendment rights which you may remember from recent confirmation hearings: yes, we can let felons have guns, because a felony "includes everything from Kanter's offense, mail fraud, to selling pigs without a license in Massachusetts, redeeming large quantities of out-of-state bottle deposits in Michigan, and countless other state and federal offenses." Thus it's very poorly related to the risk levels involved. (DC vs Heller.)
Overreliance on the category "felon" also shows up in a recent Gorsuch take on the Fourth Amendment: "We live in a world in which everything has been criminalized. And some professors have even opined that there's not an American alive who hasn't committed a felony in some—under some state law. And in a world like that, why doesn't it make sense to retreat back to the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment, which I'm going to oversimplify, but generally says that you get to go into a home without a warrant if the officer sees a violent action or something that's likely to lead to imminent violence… Why isn't that the right approach?
(Lange v. California)
Yep, if a felony wasn't violent, or perhaps not even gun-related, I don't see why felons shouldn't be able to own guns.
(I mean, I'm generally against the level of private gun ownership we have in the US, but given 2A, it seems like a violation to deny anyone their constitutional rights based on a broad label like "felon".)
In certain parts of the world. Meanwhile, the rest of the world doesn't try to ruin the whole lives of people who made a mistake and already paid for it by serving their time in prison (or whatever the court ruled).
I find the idea that a single crime you commited makes you somehow less of a human being incredibly backwards and brutal. Plus, it seems to be not very effective.
From what I read there are complex socio-economic reasons for the system to be shaped that way, but from an outsider perspective - so without caring about said reasons - it looks absolutely crazy.
So serving a prison sentence is not enough in this case? If someone is convicted of things like pirating, we should punish them permanently in random domains for the rest of their life? Gee, I wonder why recidivism rates are so high...
What is the point of the legal system if everyone is just going to apply extra-legal, -arbitrary- punishments on top of it?
Firstly, this ignores the fact that most crime occurs due to socioeconomic reasons. So you're kicking someone in the head after they're already down and have served a punishment doled out by a judge.
Secondly, obviously the -type- of crime should make things more difficult or impossible in certain cases. But arbitrarily punishing people for having any conviction at all is the opposite of what a healthy society should be doing. This thoroughly ensures that recidivism rates will remain high, because what's the point in trying to cooperate with a society that brands you as a criminal no matter what punishment you serve or what you do throughout the rest of your life?
We need to focus on rehabilitation, not continuing to punish people for the rest of their lives.
"That might not be fair, but that's how it is."
Sorry to be blunt, but hopefully this punitive attitude will die out as older people die out. This is one American attitude that I absolutely despise.
It seems strange that a state solely determines the boundary for a crime, solely enforces that boundary, solely executes the related punishment, and then suddenly everyone’s piling on.
If it’s the job of the state, it should be the job of the state.
> What is the point of the legal system if everyone is just going to apply extra-legal, -arbitrary- punishments on top of it?
To control the application of violence and to make sure the preexisting rules are being followed before it is applied.
If you don't have any verification that the rules are being followed, those in power tend to do pretty horrible things. At the same time, if those in power use no violence, the populace tend to resort to extra-legal violence to deliver what they see as justice, which results in a different class or horrible things happening (and threatens the government's monopoly on legitimized violence).
It's basically a local maximum that still kind of sucks, but works better than anything else we've tried at scale.
We've tried getting the government involved in social punishment, but it tends to work out very poorly and it seems best just to have them not enter that sphere.
> what's the point in trying to cooperate with a society that brands you as a criminal no matter
Potentially nothing, but that's a question for society, not for the government/legal system. Society is supposed to control the government, not the other way around (or at least that's the theory, practice is sometimes pretty spotty).
It should also be noted that there's no requirement for people to add these extra punishments. So, it should be pretty easy to turn around if people ever pull their heads out of their asses.
It doesn't have to be, though, and it's something that can be changed. And it must be, else the US will collapse under the weight of its own incarceration and injustice.
I'm not sure if you're advocating for the "way it is" but I hope not. The way it is isn't fair and the legal system, and society in general, should realize that and improve it.
> I'm not sure if you're aware, but this is a very US thing. In Europe it's not even uncommon with laws against discriminating on these grounds as well.
As (almost) always when "Europe" comes up in the comments of this site to oppose it with the USA: *Europe is not a thing* (as in: it is not an homogenous thing at all, it covers many different countries with many different situations, laws and everything).
At least in France, quite many jobs require a criminal record to be presented, to check that you were not sentenced for a crime/offence deemed incompatible with the specific position.
It is less invasive, and less public than in the USA, but it pretty well exists and is perfectly legal.
For security related jobs you need a clean criminal record n Greece/Cyprus but if you ask my opinion a criminal knows how criminals work and think so it would be an asset to have a criminal working (with devotion, not trolling) for a security company.
You say "you" but I have no particular complaints about letting someone who ran a Bittorrent tracker run a DNS registry. They committed a thought crime, not a murder. If their DNS registry is mismanaged, I can easily take my business elsewhere. What's next, you can't get a job because you got a parking ticket one time? Why would you let someone who can't read parking signs write software, after all?
I'd prefer to get some data on what the risk is here. Among criminals, how many commit their second crime while running a DNS registry? If we don't know, I am not sure it's rational to give someone a life sentence in that domain. It's just punitive, not intelligent risk management.
It’s also very common to misuse criminal justice systems to control dissidents, ethnic groups, women etc. A strategy beloved of bigots and reactionaries, authoritarians and totalitarians, from Mississippi to Moscow.
It's very uncommon in many parts of the world. In countries that aim to reform and educate criminals during their time behind bars, not giving them opportunities when they get out seems illogical.
Perhaps we can make this a little easier and more obvious for people?
How about when you’re convicted of an offense you have to wear a letter on your chest representing that offense? The shame and additional punishment should go on indefinitely long after the actual punishment has ended, right?
They don't have "that" box in the application (whether you have a conviction). They have a different box in the application (whether you have a conviction for fraud or similar) that according to the story, ICANN agree Sunde did not need to check.
That box said fraud or similar in the last 10 years. Even if you agree that his TPB charges fit the "and similar" part, he wasn't charged with anything in the last decade, since 2008 is over 10 years ago.
Thank you for the downvotes. it proves you care a lot to protect the sanctity status of a professional manipulator (to me, to you he can be Jesus). Please when you downvote take the time to explain why you downvoted but dont insutl me or my gender or my country. If it unrelated to misogyny and hate for non-whites, then fee freel to explain exactly why you are downvoting me. I really want to know and engage in convo if your downvoting is made not out of political allegiance and blind following of the politics of Mr Kolmisopi but because as free thinking individuals you have a logical argument to downvote me. Thank you for the attention thus far.
As I understood the article, the application asks about convictions for fraud. Sunde was convicted of criminal copyright infringement, which is not fraud nor substantially similar.
A "no convicted felons" rule might be entirely reasonable, but it doesn't appear they have one, and they should not move the goalposts after an application (with a fee) has been submitted.
Sorry to say that, but this is 'ur-fascism' at its best.
The difference here is that the nazi's pre-condemned anyone who were of a give ethnic background(jews) or believe (communists).
Unlike them, you are praying that the society condemn over prejudice, people based on their past behavior, placing a star on their chest and denying them basic rights, which may start with "innocent" rights like these being taken from them.
You can only punish people when a considered criminal activity occurs, never assuming someone have ill intentions over their past behavior and therefore should be denied the rights of whatever is being negotiated.
Don't forget either that with such laws and ethical triggers in place governments, companies and individuals might just game the system and threat someone by forcing him into prison for bogus reason destroying his life even after he is free. (And how can we call this dystopian reality freedom?)
BTW The Sunde prison is exactly this case, but there are even more proeminent cases as Assange or Snowden.
Your are talking only about ICANN here of course, but the core of the issue you are defending here will inevitable lead to the consequences i'm exposing above.
I'd have to agree. If you are going to become a trusted party in a context where people have to trust that you are willing to follow rules, even when you may disagree with them, then you will have a problem with someone whose identity is to not follow rules.
I'm sure Sunde would agree that he doesn't follow the rules if he disagrees with them. And proudly so.
One may have one's own opinion on why he did this and whether or not anyone turning it into publicity gold by being outraged is a naive moron, but one would, of course, keep those opinions to oneself. :-)
No, but if you were someone infamous for ignoring traffic rules systematically over many years, because you thought that there should be no traffic rules, resulting in very visible legal wrangling, it would be optimistic of you to apply for a position as someone who administers driving tests.
> They basically admitted that they don’t like me. They’ve banned me for nothing else than my political views. This is typical discrimination. Considering I have no one to appeal to except them, it’s concerning, since they control the actual fucking center of the internet.
Next-level deplatforming. From a non-profit. That essential controls the internet. Yay.
> Next-level deplatforming. From a non-profit. That essential controls the internet. Yay.
And it’s pretty rich coming from ICANN after they eliminated .org price caps (coincidentally) before their associates tried to usurp the registry for private equity interests.
It’s almost funny to see these multi billion dollar grifters disparaging someone for theft (copyright infringement).
People don't type addresses, they open google, type "facebook" there and click the first link. Phishing often relies on similarity between different domain names. Switching to tor domains will remove assumption of reliability of domain name reading.
It will be harder to verify whether an address is real or fake. You would have to trust the search engines. Offloading the responsibility to google basically makes google the DNS provider
Readable addresses means you can go to some site for the first time and be sure it's the address you wanted. It's not a SHA256 checksum, but it's human-doable in some seconds.
No way, man. This isn't cancel culture. This is just a non-profit exercising their rights. If he doesn't like it, all he has to do is create his own internet and a procedure for assigning DNS names and IP addresses and then get the whole world to switch over to it. /s
When you're a state-sponsored monopoly the rules are a bit different whether you're a private entity or not. So it'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
(I know ICANN is not currently being sponsored by the US government anymore, but they were given their monopoly that way)
>all he has to do is create his own internet and a procedure for assigning DNS names and IP addresses
Or, y'know, just set up a copy of the DNS system using the existing software and standards for the existing Internet, but using different root servers.
DNS is well documented and open source for the most part, so it's not as if ICANN's control of the root servers means they can't be bypassed.
There is no free market. Just copyrights / patents alone show that. If I had invented something or way more likely came up with something obvious I should not be looking over my shoulder and waiting for some corporation to sue me for rounded corners or button placed on the form. Suddenly those big corps run crying to their daddy for protection.
In the US, yes. “Convicted felon” is not a protected class. Many businesses ask during your application or hiring process if you’ve ever been “convicted of a felony”. The idea is: “we don’t want a thief manning the cash registers!” There’s also the general misconception that “if you’re in, or were in, prison, it’s because you’re a bad person.” But the problem is: they served their debt to society (jail), and innocent people are jailed all the time.
If they were still a threat to society after 5 years or whatever, then they shouldn’t’ve been sentenced to just 5 years. And with innocent people being convicted, the bar to get it fixed is very high because (in some states), you have to not only prove you’re innocence, but that the prosecution messed up (such as withholding evidence). And don’t forget about prosecutorial immunity!
And if it is fixed, how do you answer that question? Yes, you were convicted, but it’s not on your record because you proved your innocence. Yes? No? Answer yes, and you’re denied. Answer no, and when they find out about it, you’re fired, and can only hope your bosses will fight for you and win.
Presumably if they were let out of prison it's been decided that they are not longer a risk or have paid their debt to society.
So no, convicted murderers should not be prevented from being a cashier, nor any other job they qualify for. At any rate, the best way to steer someone back into crime is to take away their ability to have a job. How else are they supposed to survive?
If he got out of prison than that suggests he's not a serial killer and thus safe to undertake in societal activities, like shopping or manning a cash register. Really the only real to deny a job to a released convict is if their crime directly correlates to the job, I.E. don't hire someone who was convicted for embezzling $200 million as your accountant.
Well, if they’re out of prison, then it’s been decided that they’re no longer a threat to society. Because, in a lot of prisons, you can be kept past your date on certain conditions. So why not let them man a register?
I’m not saying you can’t keep a close eye on them. I’m sure a manager would be doing that. What I’m saying is: in America, society has decided that you’re worthless if you go to prison. We try so hard to keep people from reintegrating into the real world, it’s no wonder our recidivism rate is so high.
He is not wanted by interpol as he was arrested in 2014 and has served his time in Swedish prison. He was asked if he was convicted of fraud which he was not.
>“Not only that, but they’re also upset I was wanted by Interpol.”
Note the use of "was" here.
> I got some sort of semi-excuse regarding their claim that I lied on my application. They also said that they agreed it wasn’t fraud or similar really. So both of the points they made regarding the denial were not really the reason,” Sunde clarifies.
This sounds different from "concealing criminal history".
Technically you're not a criminal until convicted, only suspected.
Likewise, you're not a criminal if you've served your time. The US culture of "ex cons" is shameful.
This culture is not just the US. But sure they probably love to "deplatform" people from ever having decent life again and keep them into that slave low pay factory.
OT: I really hate seeing this in threads. Perhaps HN would be better served by a "disavow" function that would remove the username from the post? A person could edit out any potentially identifying information and disavow the post, leaving the content for context.
I don’t see the problem. He has shown over many years that he isn’t someone to be trusted with this type of accreditation. His past convictions aside, he has shown that breaking the rules is his normalcy. He is still active with many members that still coordinate with illegal activities. Yes ICANN has too much power, but I understand and respect their rejecting Sunde.
> He has shown over many years that he isn’t someone to be trusted with this type of accreditation. His past convictions aside, he has shown that breaking the rules is his normalcy.
Is the URL bar lying to me? Am I actually on Bootlicker News, where hackers are not to be trusted, overly-powerful and unaccountable institutions get "understand[ing] and respect", and rulebreaking is grounds for excommunication?
You don't see the problem because you are the problem.
I accept my inevitable gray punishment for negative meta discussion but it's worth stating, HN is overwhelmingly corporatist and authoritarian these days.
"The Dark Enlightenment" means you think the Enlightenment was bad, it would be clearer to say that he does not think the Enlightenment was a good thing, for a general audience.
I’m not going to support anyone that makes a profit breaking the rules, gets caught, says sorry not sorry, continues to profit off breaking the rules in the name of privacy and free internet, and then cries that they’re no longer trusted to break the rules.
> I’m not going to support anyone that makes a profit breaking the rules, gets caught, says sorry not sorry, continues to profit off breaking the rules
I agree with the idea that ICANN seems to be in a reasonable way. They are based on the idea of control over companies/groups that MUST work by an agreed upon set of rules if the system is to work. Peter has proven over the years that he is comfortable breaking whatever rules he decides to. Choosing not to work with someone with that mindset seems reasonable for ICANN.
However, I do think they should come out with a clear, public statement of why those chose not to work with him.
On a tangent...
I am really uncomfortable with the fact that your comment was downvoted (enough to be noticeable). I get that people may disagree with the opinion you are expressing with it, but I was under the impression that downvotes on HN are supposed to be for comments that are off topic / do not move the conversation forward / inappropriate / etc. Your comment very clearly does not fall afoul of those rules; it's an opinion to be discussed.
Im not a hacker of networks, but I had to learn how stuff words when I had a pirate bay chatroom manager go to reddit and other places and do as much slandering as he/she could.
I still dont know what he /she did that against me?
Im even politically kinda on their side. So it baffled and still baffles me why so much personal hate against me. I now discover that entire internet relay chat, and hacktivist cultures online, are blindly on pirate bay side, because they dont use their own judgements as independent humans (independent of the need to have a leader or a superstar to follow...). Its sad that intelligent people cannot keep a neutral ground for themselves and even judge their own friends from a neutral perpective. I have been severely harassed by a pirate bay admin and still I dont hate the pirate bay, I try to investigate what made the manager of the pirate bay today harass me with such devotion. But then I see that people who follow the pirate bay mindsets and politics aren't exactly free thinking individuals. They come from the extreme-leftist political area where violence is JUSTIFIED always if its used against ''the enemies''. And im their enemy apparently. Im not even a fuc...cen journo lady.Im a NOBODY.
> Over the phone, ICANN explained that the matter was discussed internally. This unnamed group of people concluded that the organization is ‘not comfortable’ doing business with him.
It's the height of arrogance that they didn't even feel the need to come up with any better excuse, just this. And of course:
ICANN were asked to comment on the story but chose not to do so. If they have anything to say, they are free to issue a statement anytime. Meanwhile, what we know so far, together with their lack of response, should be more than enough to have an opinion about the whole situation.
You can form your opinion based on anything you want...
But if you do it based on an unsubstantiated semi-incoherent one-sided account, I think we can safely say you don't care about the truth of the matter.
But if you do it based on an unsubstantiated semi-incoherent one-sided account, I think we can safely say you don't care about the truth of the matter.
So, people or groups are immune from criticism as long as they refuse to speak on the issue? I guess that's one stance to take.
I think that's precisely what ICANN was going for. Reacting to it, in the eyes of some people, implies there's at least some truth to what the other party said.
ICANN't is a corrupt scam, and everyone who follows Internet issues knows it.
They're continually coming up with new rip-offs to get people or organizations to apply for and then keep the astronomical fee after rejecting the application. Registrars, TLD owners...
Oh yeah, the "unlimited" TLD scam was one of the most offensive. They made it look like they were finally going to do the right thing and get rid of canned TLDs... but nope.
ICANN should be abolished. What should replace it? I don't know.
Although interesting, this is overshadowed by the growing politicisation of the internet.
ICANN seems to have a representative multi-government structure that is robust against any particular government having unreasonable influence. If a few Sundes get crushed in the gears so be it.
The US tech giants are beholden to themselves and control a scary fraction of the internet's infrastructure. They are starting to flex their muscles in regard to what should and should not appear on the internet. As far as political threats go, that is where they will materialise. Or in governments copying China's strategy for engaging with technology.
The US first amendment protects all speech, not just political speech. Most particularly it protects offensive speech because that is the only kind that needs protecting. We endure many inefficiencies for the freedoms we allow, the idea is that those freedoms are worth the cost.
Indeed, if the drafters had forseen corporatism many things might have been different. And then there is the organized persecution of peers for their horribly offensive (read differing) opinions that is allowed by our modern communication tools. Is freedom of speech freedom to persecute? Maybe having really bad ideas should become a protected class? I say that only half jokingly, I have no answers.
The drafters didn't foresee protected classes (in the legal sense you're using the term, if I understand correctly); in fact, several of those protected classes simply weren't granted the rights granted to white male landowners by the Constitution the drafters framed.
I don't know how much guidance we can take from the original drafters on the novel problems of the modern era.
At what point do we stop calling a company a small profit-taking endeavor and start calling them a government in everything but name? When they have a monopoly over national communication infrastructure? When they control a small city complete with infrastructure just to service a Florida theme park? How about when they overthrow foreign governments to grow bananas easier?
Well some companies are starting to look more and more like the government. Besides corporations are protected by the government from certain things. The populace should be protected from their actions as well. Existence of big corporation always affects life of many people so it is only fair that those corps should be restricted in what their can do.
For one thing those corps main duty is to make money. If they engage in morality setting instead they should have their business license revoked.
Corruption from ICANN is 100x worse than big tech. ICANN can just tell DNS servers not to route anything to do with you and threaten others to do the same.
The strategy is different, and clear though. First monopolize contents, then censor. It seemed impossible to do in the web when it bloomed. Compared with tv, it was a difficult beast to tame. But free resources, convenience and having all your contacts captive work as a charm.
Why do you believe ICANN’s multi-government structure is somehow robust against any one government or small consortium of governments having too much power?
ICANN corruption is wel-known at this point after the .org fiasco. A lot of DNS industry folks are now giving decentralized DNS alternatives more attention. I wonder if we’re reaching a tipping point — it’s not unimaginable to me that in 10 years ICANN’s influence over DNS is significantly reduced as decentralized alternatives take over
I doubt that every individual connected to these organizations have a spot free reputation, so ICANN is really putting themselves in a weird position by singling out Sunde.
No, guilty as found by a court that handed him an eight month jail sentence. Even if you think that was unfair and his Pirate Bay enterprise was generally a good thing for content discovery, it's unsurprising that an organisation for the administration of intellectual property doesn't consider an enterprise run by someone with a conviction for criminal copyright infringement suitable for its partner list.
So, what's the point of punishment if you can't be rehabilitated anyway ? Why bother deciding on the exact perimeter of a sentence if the only thing that will matter is a boolean ?
Believe it or not, the criteria for an entity to trust someone enough to grant them the privilege of accrediting them as a domain registrar can be somewhat different from the criteria the state uses to decide whether it is cruel and unusual not to release them from prison. The fact some people can be rehabilitated, doesn't mean that they always are, or that keeping people in jail indefinitely because they haven't said sorry is a proportional punishment/deterrent. The social consensus you're arguing against is that the range of attitudes towards people convicted of crimes shouldn't be as simple as a boolean updating from INCARCERATE to MAXIMUM TRUST on the date they say sorry.
The problem is not their opinion, its their inordinate extrajudicial power to extend punishment indefinitely upon people which have already paid their debt to society, at the behest of corporations.
Sure, if you consider "concluding someone convicted by due process of offence against IP who continues to ridicule the concept of IP unsuitable for accreditation to administer IP" to be 'indefinite punishment' which seems more than a little hyperbolic.
For related reasons, if you're convicted of creating malware and continue to loudly and publicly defend the principle of creating malware after your release, it's not cruel and unusual punishment if tech companies won't give partner certifications to your software consultancy
> After the first final review of our application, ICANN made a background check of everyone involved in the application (we're a team). My first contacts with ICANN I've been very open with who I am - I mentioned they should google me. My background is.. let's say different. [...]
> After the background check I get a reply that I've "checked the wrong boxes" on parts of the application. There's some boxes saying: (paraphrasing) "have anyone in the team being convicted of fraud or similar in the past 10 years".
> Noone in the team has been convicted of that. Nor murder, manslaughter, theft, breaking & entering, or anything else. I was involved in a case of aiding with copyright infringement from 2005-2006. That's 15+ years ago. And not fraud or similar. [...]
> However, @ICANN is of another opinion. After spending over half a year to review the application (with a bi-weekly email stating that the delay is normal, nothing to be concerned about), they decided to deny the application since "the wrong box was ticked".
What the heck: "You convicted for fraud in the past 10 years?" "Nope." "You liar, you were convicted in 2006!"
Someone needs to tell the ICANN what year it is.
Also, they didn't notice before? Not like internet people should have never heard of his name.
To be honest, the next thing he writes (being actively wanted by interpol) does sound a bit fishy, I can see why that would make a bureaucrat on the other end of the line a bit less happy to comply. Imagine someone calls up your org and you find she (or he) is wanted in multiple countries, well, I can sort of see the point there, regardless of whether it's just in this particular case.
> Also, they didn't notice before? Not like internet people should have never heard of his name.
One of the craziest things about the internet to me is that everyone treats their experience of “the internet” as THE experience of “THE internet” like it’s one singular conception that we all enjoy. But, the internet is huge and diverse and full of distinct niches such that no two “internets” (as conceived of as an individual’s experience of it) are almost ever close to the same. The idea that surely the good people at ICANN would know this guy (I certainly didn’t) is so striking to me as derivative of this.
I notice this a lot, e.g. I have no idea what Internet the people in India are seeing because I barely ever seem to meet them online. But this is an American organisation, you can't tell me The Pirate Bay is something unknown there. The lawsuits against it were equally big news there, from what I gathered. Someone might still have missed it, and I'm sure my mom will have, but then my mom doesn't work for one of the Internet's core infrastructure organisations and doesn't handle applications where you need to check for fraud on the Internet.
I’m American and know of TPB, doesn’t mean I know who its founders are! The lawsuits were never particularly big news in my experience. I honestly don’t even specifically know what or when TPB was in active legal hot water nor do I have any idea on outcome. I have a vague idea that it probably happened at some point but only because I know that TPB enabled piracy. I remember more specifically individuals getting in trouble for using TPB than anyone creating TPB getting in trouble.
I’ve also heard of Pinterest for example but barely know the product and definitely don’t know the founders.
What’s more, you’re committing the same perspective but just at a slightly different scale. What I said originally about fractured internet experiences is also totally true if you restrict to American users! Plenty of American users of the internet are highly frequently so but don’t pirate, for example!
That’s quite the straw man. Like, I didn’t even mention anything about web search so that’s a really quite the attempt at reconfiguring my argument into something comical to mock. What’s more, the story is pretty explicit that they did look into the guys background and discovered his past, probably via web search. I was talking about the assumption that the people at ICANN should have known this “famous” person before that.
The raid on TPB was in 2006. The conviction was in 2009, the sentencing in 2010, and the sentence was served in 2014. Depending on when, exactly, in 2019 the application was submitted, it may have been just inside 10 years since the conviction.
That's not to get into whether the application should have been denied or blah blah blah, just want to throw out that shifting from when the conviction was to when the raid happened is somewhat disingenuous.
> I asked quite a few times very pragmatic questions: When am I allowed to be a member? Their answer: Can't say. So what's the problem with me being a member? Their answer: I could break the agreement!
> Many of the people working at ICANN are lawyers. ICANN is a very IP heavy organisation (domains are trademark territory) which means a lot of people has previously worked in other IP organisations such as movie and music studios. They're all located in Los Angeles, a small world.
The main difference to me seems that some in the West are vehemently denying anything is even happening.
'There is no cancel culture. You are just being held accountable. People just don't like you. You have no right to social media. Make your own app/cloud/host..'
every social system has the concept of people that are not the right sort, and that are just not allowed to be part of the prestigious organizations because of some issue.
The problem with China's social credit system is that it is a codification and automation of the prejudices of the system designed to maintain power.
This example here is just the old fashioned display of the prejudices of the organization.
Also, most social status systems developed organically from networks of trust, common experiences and mutually held values at a micro level like within a family, town, school, religious group, etc.
Comparing that organic system of social appraisal with anything like a mass scale surveillance social credit system, or international communications censoring organization like ICANN, is deeply unreasonable. It is clearly not the same thing, and centralized control of reputation by a government arguably poses huge totalitarian risks with zero offsetting benefits for citizens.
>> most social status systems developed organically from networks of trust, common experiences and mutually held values at a micro level like within a family, town, school, religious group
I don't see how size or organicity are useful factors to appraise actions by certain institutions as "unreasonable". If you have ever read the Scarlet Letter or the Crucible, those "smaller" centralized institutions (i.e. families, towns, schools, etc.) have played the part of censorious zealot just as much as the bigger ones.
Yes, these witches will definitely kill us all, so we must immediately burn them without any due process. Don't worry, this is definitely a one-off exception; we would certainly never extend the same claim to any other group or claim that someone is a witch with no actual evidence. We will totally provide you and people you care about with a fair trial when the mob comes for you.
Systems must provide due process, but if you let yourself be slippery sloped into spending time and energy to support your own extermination (e.g. by doing business with nazis) that's really something.
Although I sympathise with that view too, it's unclear to me whether this tactic actually works against the feared outcome, which is Nazis gaining political power. Let's say we do keep an eye on them, and we see something we really don't like. What do we do then? Just keep on keeping an eye on them?
It's also unclear what 'underground' means here. Most communication (and particularly political organizing) happens over the Internet, and people regularly gain access to ideologically-bent forums. Was Parler 'underground'? Is a closed Facebook group 'underground'? At first glance, it seems that such groups being 'underground' is actually what we want to happen. More caution to conceal their activities and spread of information would limit the number of people getting into such a movement.
If the ideas are out in the open, we have to accept that there will be points at which rhetoric wins out over 'ideas', and that even if the marketplace of ideas produces correct results in the long run, we're still left dealing with incorrect results in the short run. Maybe that's a reasonable judgement for a libertarian point of view, but it's equally reasonable and understandable that someone may not want to make that concession at all.
We had a lot of Nazis right out in the open here in the US in the 1930's. And I don't mean what they call "Nazis" today, I mean 100% legit Nazis. And a lot of them. This idea that if Nazi's are allowed to spread their message openly they will inevitably take over is nonsense and propaganda to get people to support censorship.
> This idea that if Nazi's are allowed to spread their message openly they will inevitably take over
This isn't the claim; the claim is more moderate: Nazis gaining political power, and not necessarily inevitably doing so. Nazis are only an example here; you can substitute any 'wrong' idea to see the analogies, from climate change denial to anti-vaxx to flat earth theories. Further, political power is only the end goal. I think most people would agree that a society where a large percentage of the population consists of (Nazis/anti-vaxxers/climate deniers) who don't vote in themselves would have negative discursive effects socially or politically on those who do vote. The state has power, but it does not have absolute power, and that's a good thing.
Yes but I would say censorship has a greater negative effect. I would be willing to support censorship if it was guaranteed to prevent an inevitable nazi takeover. I do not support censorship against "negative discursive effects."
That's understandable, so we're back to the point I made at the end of my original comment, which is that while we may accept that the best ideas do not triumph in the short run, it's reasonable to think the cost is worth bearing, and it's also reasonable to think the cost isn't worth bearing. I think there are convincing arguments to be made from both points of view. I think it's also worth bringing other democratic ideals into the picture, such as democratic equality, and questioning why (or why not) freedom of speech should always be selected over those other ideals.
For many, some more balancing between the ideals of speech autonomy and democratic equality is strongly justified - see some regulation in Europe for example.
Free speech and democratic equality go together. Censorship means that there is a select group of powerful people that get to decide what ideas are allowed.
They can go together, but they can also conflict. There's lots of argumentation on how hate speech and pornography can undermine democratic equality for minority groups and women respectively. See the SEP article on freedom of speech[0].
I get what the article is saying, but I feel like they are playing word games. Hate speech laws are not increasing freedom, they are trading off freedom for social cohesion, which all societies do to some extent, just not necessarily with censorship.
Both hate speech laws and groups like Antifa were present and used against NSDAP in the Weimar Germany. What is clear is that tactics like censoring them do not work. You cannot just beat ideas out of peoples' heads, whether it's nazis, BLM, communists or whoever really. This as well has been tried countless times throughout the history and it never did any good.
> “And so, I established in 1919 a programme and tendency that was a conscious slap in the face of the democratic-pacifist world. [We knew] it might take five or ten or twenty years, yet gradually an authoritarian state arose within the democratic state, and a nucleus of fanatical devotion and ruthless determination formed in a wretched world that lacked basic convictions.
> Only one danger could have jeopardised this development — if our adversaries had understood its principle, established a clear understanding of our ideas, and not offered any resistance. Or, alternatively, if they had from the first day annihilated with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement.
> Neither was done. The times were such that our adversaries were no longer capable of accomplishing our annihilation, nor did they have the nerve. Arguably, they furthermore lacked the understanding to assume a wholly appropriate attitude. Instead, they began to tyrannise our young movement by bourgeois means, and, by doing so, they assisted the process of natural selection in a very fortunate manner. From there on, it was only a question of time until the leadership of the nation would fall to our hardened human material.
>You cannot just beat ideas out of peoples' heads, whether it's nazis, BLM, communists or whoever really.
This isn't the goal of such laws; the goal is to hobble the spread and reach of those ideas, not to change individual peoples' minds. It's forward-looking, not present-looking. It is also a show of the state's policy towards a particular ideology, and it carries the state's discursive authority with it. In a similar way, the point of laws against child pornography isn't to change the mind of the child pornographer, it's to slow and aim to stop the spread of the material, while attaching the state's authority to the idea that child abuse and its recording and distribution is wrong.
As a counterexample, it's documented that segregation laws had two effects; the first is keeping blacks and whites separate, the second is the authority of the law, as crafted by the sovereign body of the country, enshrined the inferiority of blacks, which reflected in the attitudes of whites and the psychology of blacks at the time. Something being legally enshrined has a very similar effect to how taxes discourage the goods they are levied on in the marketplace.
There were times when if you said something critical about the establishment, you were simply disappeared, never to be seen again. And it still didn't stop the ideas from spreading, it only gained you sympathy from the population and converted more people to your side. You can say that the goal is this or that, but it doesn't change the fact that 64% of Republicans said that they are extremely/very concerned about the censorship[1]. Which sort of confirms what I am saying, people will be more sympathetic to you if you got censored. If you're a serious political activist, I'd expect you to perceive the censorship not as a disaster, but just another opportunity to further your political goals. Which doesn't mean that it's dishonest, censorship is bullshit and they're right to feel that way, but politics is still politics.
I also like this, because it forces us to know what is going to hit us in the future (terrorist attacks?(
Like we want to know who is planning to blow up someo building. Why wouldnt we want to know?
But the pirate bay co-founder Anakata says in this interview below that he defends the rights of pedos to have a website about their views (i think he clarifies at he doesnt allow pedo material but only a webiste about their "political" views), and that he is fighting for that right. To have their views in the open. So my question is, do you "progre" also agree with Anakata that aside Neonazis the Pedo politicians should also have their say in public view? And if you believe yes they should, can you elaborate why?
The status quo is that it is illegal to rob Nazis, but legal to choose not to provide DDoS protection for them. It's the second bit people are objecting to here...
I would love for them to sue Cloudflare and bring up the fact that Cloudflare is knowly hosting illegal ddos-for-hire services which forces people to buy DDOS protection.....
But the argument is about due process: are we actually sure that an Bob is a a Nazi, or did him neighbour create a fake twitter account to impersonate him? Is it his namesake that he never met?
What if Steve is Bob's conpetitor and conveniently accused Bob of being a Nazi?
Suppose Bob is a nazi but hasn't commited any crimes, how far can we go, what else can we deny, can we refuse them a website? A mobile phone connection? electricity and running water? School for his child?
I guess every public internet policy should now include a clause such as "We reserve the right to not do any business with you if we don't like you, regardless of any other provision of the policy".
At least, it will be honest.
PS. Variations may include: "...if we don't like you OR we don't like anyone you like...".
That's already in most policies without qualifying it's because they don't like you.
Here's an example:
> We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Service at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Service) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Service or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Service
The right is reserved, no need to give any reason.
Why do the pirate bay founders get treated like pariah while other "business men" like the people in Kazaa - like for example Zennström and Friis who went on to create Skype - are treated like everyone else?
That's funny given all the scammers they have accredited, ie. when your domain expires and goes under "infinite lock" because 2 registars lock it for as long as they can and then transfer it to the other.
This was my reaction. They've let cybersquatters go nuts ruining the domain registration system for years. UDRP is fine for big businesses but what about everyone else? Why do they allow companies to run bots on the dictionary and register thousands of names at wholesale rates that go years without an active site?
I spoke with Vint Cerf when he was the head of ICANN about GoDaddy's abusive policies that blocked customers from transferring domains, they went years without doing anything about that as well.
And don't get me started on the willingness of registrars to look the other way and pocket the cash when spammers register "word salad" domain names by the bajillion for their snowshoe[0] spam operations.
I really doubt it has anything to do with thepiratebay, instead it's very likely due to his current project njal.la that provides anonymous domain names.
Would anyone be surprised if a defence of "why worry? Just make your own non-profit global corporation to control IP address space allocation" is being expressed amongst some here? Or would that be a bit of a stretch?
Probably worth noting that several people are, in fact, suggesting distributed DNS as the solution here.
Whether a rival private corporation or a distributed federation, competition is the only option if one doesn't trust a government to take the responsibility over.
Ironically, this was a better proof of transparency than what most "problematic" people would subject themselves to. If any vanilla oligarch wanted to be in those circles, he would just pay some squeaky-clean individual to be his stooge, and then make it known, after registration, who the real power is. Sunde could have configured himself as a freelance consultant to his friends, and he would not have appeared on any radar. This would have made his business work, but it would not have advanced the perennial conversation about ICANN's original sins, which have become more and more untolerable with the years.
ICANN were pretty stupid to just veto his admission. That's not how you deal with institutional critics. They could have simply brought him in, then informally and formally vetoed anything he wanted to do. They have experience with people who tried to blow up things "from inside" in the past, so clearly they've developed countermeasures ready for that scenario. Or they could have given him something, enough to behold him, so he'd have an incentive to stay in the tent and piss outside rather than the other way around.
This attitude proved Sunde is fundamentally right on the subject matter, like him or not as a person.