I'm using wpForo since it integrates well with my CMS. The first users showed up in the first week, mostly because I directed YouTube questions that required posting error logs and the like to the forums. It has been a good tool for helping people out.
If Cloudflare is so vital to the internet, it should be nationalized for the public benefit as having a private entity with so much control over the internet is not a good thing. Corporatized control of the internet should not be encouraged.
I trust a corporation more than I trust the nation you want it nationalized in (America?)
EU maybe. But yes I don't want cloudflare to be part of america after patriotic acts and all the dystopia.
Honestly, cloudflare is not so vital to the internet. Like, The only thing its gonna be a problem if they stop working without giving any way to migrate. Then yes, its gonna be a bit of problem to the internet.
Really? Try distrusting CF certs, and see how much of your internet activity breaks. CF certs should be distrusted, because it's MITM by definition. At the very least, I'd like an addon that makes the URL bar bright red, so I know my connection isn't secure.
Yup, I also meant the same when I was writing my comment and although I agree about regulation, the thing is, that I don't even trust that aspect...
Also, I know that there are sometimes where cloudflare sits in the middle between your servers and your users for DDOS protection, and so yes theoretically its a point of interception but given how their whole thing is security, I doubt that they would exploit it but yes its a point of concern.
On the other hand, if something like this does happen, migrating can be easier or on the same level if something like this happened on like AWS.
But cloudflare still feels safer than AWS y'know?
That being said, I am all in for some regulations as a public utility but not nationalizing it as the GP comment suggested. Just some regulations would be nice but honestly we are in a bit of tough spot and maybe it was the necessity of the internet to have something like cloudflare to prevent DDOS's.
Hm, you raise good points but I just thought when I was writing that comment, that if there was even a single case of somebody using that MITM then that would just make everyone leave cloudflare and find either other mechanism or something else that's safer for sure.
I think that cloudflare is used by most as DDOS protection and so they still have the servers.
There are also cloudflare workers and pages but even migrating them is somewhat doable as I think that cf workers have a local preview option somewhat available in their node etc., so you could run it locally somehow.
Sure its gonna be a huge huge problem but something that the internet might look past of (I think).
Honestly, I kinda wish that there was a way to have something like how the tor onion links work in the sense that the link has the public key of the person running the server and so uh, no matter if its cloudflare serving the link or something else, its still something that can't be MITM'd for the most part.
Am I right in thinking so? Sure, its gonna make the links longer but maybe sacrifices/compromises must be made?
The EU is quickly becoming a dystopian nightmare with age verification, mandated encryption backdoors, and generally an extremely invasive form of government. So no thanks.
No thanks to this level of evaluation which doesn’t even rise to “analysis”, it’s just a word salad association that picks two hobby horses and pretends they represent the apocalypse while ignoring all the measures on which many EU participating countries are producing quality of life and personal freedom at outlier levels.
Lets just hope that EU doesn't add that age verification thing or those Cert based things which is controlled by the govt.
My opinion is simple, age verification won't work unless they block VPN (something which UK wants to do/ is doing) and that sets a really really bad precedent and I doubt if its entirely possible without breaking some aspects of internet or complete internet privacy.
EU in aggregate is net positive but it still has some things which are kinda flawed regulations that are a bad precedent, but germany kinda blocked the verification thing iirc so there is still a lot of hope and EU does look like its trying its best but I think that it can do just a bit better if they don't think of age verification or some other stuff but that's just my 2 cents.
This was why I added "maybe" tbh. They are one of the best options but even they aren't thaat good. Like its questionable I think and needs a much bigger debate
What quality of life improvements? I seriously hope major tech companies pull out of the EU market altogether instead of complying when client-side scanning is mandated. Then you can come back here and brag about how great life is in the EU.
I would say if the political environment pre 1980s was still in existence that might be true. Today that would just mean the entire thing would unravel as it ate its own tail in the race to the bottom environment we are currently in.
You can create democratic policies to thwart this. Even something as basic as nationalizing Cloudflare then forcing workplace democracy provisions on it would probably do more good for, not just the Cloudflare workers, but society writ large.
I can't imagine what a court case about whether the US president has the power to unilaterally dismiss officials in executive-branch agencies could possibly have to do with this.
At least you're referencing the United States in 1934, though. Things were very dysfunctional politically in the US at that time, but not nearly as bad as what was going on in some other parts of the world.
> can't imagine what a court case about whether the US president has the power to unilaterally dismiss officials in executive-branch agencies could possibly have to do with this
Seriously? You don't see the relevance of independent agencies to this discussion?
And the dynamics of inter-branch checks and balances within the US federal government aren't directly relevant to the question of whether the federal government as a whole is a reliable institution in the first place (nb: it isn't).
> the dynamics of inter-branch checks and balances within the US federal government aren't directly relevant to the question of whether the federal government as a whole is a reliable institution in the first place
You don’t see a reliability difference between a self-moderating and unmoderated system?
> You don’t see a reliability difference between a self-moderating and unmoderated system?
I don't see there being a distinction between the two in the real world. An institutional system's behavior largely determined by the incentive structures that actually exist on the ground, irrespective of initial intentions or de jure rules.
An institutional system that is expected to self-moderate is one where the motivations that inform its primary behavior are the same ones ultimately informing its self-moderation -- i.e. it's functionally equivalent to an unmoderated system, just more pretextual rationalization.
> Do you see any value in QC?
Sure. But I don't see much value in a QC process that's administered by the same people or judged against the same metrics as the thing it's QCing.
I'd love the equivalent of QC to be applied to both legislation and administrative rule-making in our current system. Maybe with the Loper Bright decision, the courts will gradually resume responsibility for doing this properly. But the capricious and arbitrary nature of the current administration is revealing the extent to which checks and balances are already eroded, and just what an uphill battle that's likely to be.
The entire political system in its current state is riddled with perverse incentives, and the mechanisms of external accountability are totally broken. Even with inter-branch checks and balances, the federal government in its current form is simply not trustworthy.
I don't think there has ever been a perfect time but I also think there has been an ever increasing weakness in the governments desire/ability to enforce regulation roughly since that time period.
I mean the reconstitution of AT&T was one of the IMO the biggest middle fingers to the public I've seen. It was broken up because it was a bad actor and now its back again as a worse than ever bad actor. That was kind my wake up call. I'm sure there is worse though that I don't remember because it was not tech related.
I could be wrong I'm not a huge politics person. Either way I don't think any response to me invalidates my opinion that the current government would not do a better job than cloudflare currently is.
To make sure I understand, your position is that anything vitally important to the internet should not be under the control of a plurality of institutions subject to heterogenous incentive structures, but instead should be under the centralized, monopolistic control of a single institution that is perpetually compromised by perverse incentives and ulterior motives, whose mechanisms of accountability are mostly performative and demonstrably broken?
I'm not sure that sounds like a good idea, if that's what you're saying.
My position is that if something becomes critical it should be under democratic constraints in a democratic society and not private enterprises that have no forms of control by the populace.
Maybe if Cloudflare had workplace democracy my concerns would be different, but they don't and wield too much power.
If it also helps I also think 99.99% of big tech should be broken up into separate, probably a few 100, different companies.
So yes, anything vital for the internet should be controlled by the people through democratic norms, institutions, and values rather than dictatorships by those with money over those with none.
No such thing as "democratic constraints" or "democratic society" at the level you're discussing. Democracy is an imperfect safeguard against certain types of extreme dysfunction of the political system -- a necessary one for sure, but not nearly sufficient to make the institutions it applies to trustworthy with monopolistic control over other aspects of society.
Everything reduces to specific people acting on their a priori motivations in bounded contexts, and any system of centralized control is guaranteed to enable expressions of the worst motivations of the people involved. The distinctions you're making -- "private" vs. "public", "corporations" vs. "governments", etc. -- are fundamentally meaningless.
There are no "democratic norms", just norms adhered to by specific people and the factions they form, contesting against each other for power over others. Performative "democracy" is often just cover to allow the currently dominant factions to function as "dictatorships".
Decentralization and individual autonomy are the only solution to the problems you rightly care about, but what you're proposing is literally the opposite of that.
Could you explain more what you mean? Like after 20% of someone's W2, the gambling house pays out 95/100 times? Trying to understand how this regulation works, I'm intrigued by the idea of progressive levels of taxation against industries but I don't know if this is what you're arguing.
Simply put, if a gambler shows up in court with a W2 and payouts to a gambling house, they get summary judgement against the house.
This works well because once codified ("no gambler shall owe more than 20% of their annual income to any gambling house, individually or in the aggregate") it triggers an unrecorded liability on the gambling house's clientele. In other words, the stock becomes radioactive , unless the gambling house has strong controls around client onboarding and monitoring. Auditors are never going to sign off on financials that have a huge liability unless it is proven there are strict controls in place to not let degenerate gambling continue.
The same principle could be applied to universities as well.
Basically, you have to shift the risk to the party abusing the system (in this case, not the system, but the addiction).
Gonna sound lame but the passages that really moved me were those in the beginning talking about the Native American interactions with European colonists, how some colonist couldn't stand their lifestyles and found a home with the Native Americans.
Also the section on war, how British officials thought the blitz would dissolve the people into barbarism when the opposite happened.
Couple this with declining third spaces and a government that increasingly does not care about people's mental health, something has to change and it's not like it would be hard to start public jobs programs again or encourage more civic engagement via workplace democracy.
It's pretty easy, these are private companies and not democratic institutions that build consensus within their communities. It is better to assume bad faith upon corporate actors because they don't typically advocate for things that help humanity, mostly only themselves.
It's a way for web developers to easily work in the linux sphere without getting burdened too heavily. Not saying that as a dig to web devs, I'm a web deb but that's all it really appears to me. Popular dude in web dev community made it slightly easier for other web devs to do a thing.
Because there are some H1B workers that come over as translators or other non-tech professions. Like if you need a translator that speaks Swahili for some NGO it's way easier to hire a native Swahili speaker than possibly finding a qualified American that also speaks Swahili.
I do find it interesting that these trillion dollar companies can't find domestic workers, at their level of wealth they should simply be forced to pay for the education of Americans to create a funnel of workers rather than exporting this societal need to other nations.
There are a bunch of H1Bs working as teachers in my medium sized midwestern city, making around $50k. Then there are a bunch in the healthcare sectors making from $50k to $500k. I actually feel like they are legitimate reasons they are there, very difficult to get good healthcare workers in the midwest since no one good wants to go there.
There are lots of places that are hours to days drive away from those two. Midwest is a big place, so what are you talking about? I guess you could say the talent is concentrated in a few places, but lots of places in the midwest with terrible hospitals.
I am sure the issue of talent being concentrated in a few places is a problem everywhere but it’s definitely more of a problem in the midwest; the quality of doctors and other healthcare workers there are noticeably worse than the east coast.
There is a big problem with ethnic nepotism and ghost jobs. I have been struggling to get younger people in my network hired anywhere despite solid resumes. Continuing to issue H1Bs in the current job market was bananas.
Yeah, it's hard for this to feel like a community endeavor when it's a single company deciding to act on behalf of the community while never taking input or building a consensus around the issue with said community.
Hard to not be cynical about the whole thing, especially when it's a private VC backed company doing this and not say the OpenJS Foundation.
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