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Re: Article 13 and Article 11

Posted: Fri May 17, 2019 3:08 am
by teo123
brimstoneSalad wrote:The smaller the company, the more human it is and the less predictable its behavior.
How do you know? Large groups of people are usually more prone to emotions getting in the way of their thinking than smaller groups are. At least that's the explanation given in my political science textbook as to why the Roman Law is better than the Common Law that relies too much on the jury.
brimstoneSalad wrote:There's no good evidence that laws against holocaust denial (for example, as a relatively long standing policy in many European countries) have had any such effect.
Presumably because genocide denial is banned practically everywhere, and we have nothing to compare?
brimstoneSalad wrote:Chinese censorship has been pretty successful.
How is the Chinese censorship successful? The ill-conceived attempts to cover up the Great Chinese Famine have, of course, failed miserably: people heard of it, and many of them heard an even more anti-government version of it than the true story is.
And the Internet censorship is more of an inconvenience for the companies that rely on the foreign IT services than something that actually prevents propagation of fake news and hate speech. There are estimated 100'000'000 FaceBook users in China, and even more of them who are using VPNs and various techniques to circumvent the censorship but are not using specifically FaceBook. Why are they doing that? Presumably because they think that the American media is somehow telling the truth, and are convincing themselves of the nonsense the American media is spreading even more so than people in other countries are.

Re: Article 13 and Article 11

Posted: Fri May 17, 2019 5:14 am
by teo123
Also,
brimstoneSalad wrote:The goal is to get them interested in the subjects so they'll learn more later
Well, that's not really what's going on in South Korea, is it? If you try to have a hobby there, you are going to be a bad student.

Re: Article 13 and Article 11

Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 1:31 pm
by teo123
Also, @brimstoneSalad, at the very least, if you are making it easier for the good guys to shut down websites and FaceBook pages and so on... Don't you think you must also be making it easier for the bad guys to do the same? I mean, that's how computers work: they can't tell if you are a good guy or a bad guy, they work the same for everybody.
And that's already happening. After Egypt implemented some complicated system of Internet censorship, some hackers made the Internet stop working entirely in whole country for five days.

Re: Article 13 and Article 11

Posted: Wed Jun 19, 2019 4:14 pm
by teo123
In case somebody is interested, here is what Daniel Ross from linguistforum.com told me when I asked him what he thinks about my arguments that the conventional story of the Massacre of Vukovar is mythological:
Daniel Ross wrote:As I've said, I'm not interested in arguing about political topics. You're now claiming that a documented event in 1991 is "mythological"? Etymology has nothing to do with that, obviously. And your arguments are anecdotal rather than scientific in any rigorous way.

Re: Article 13 and Article 11

Posted: Mon Jul 01, 2019 8:11 am
by teo123
Anyway, I must admit that, after doing a bit more research about how the Internet works, I've changed my mind regarding how harmful Article 11 and Article 13 are. Namely, what all the bloggers and all the mainstream media appear to ignore is the question of whether those laws can even be enforced. To me it seems now they can't actually be enforced.
Those laws presuppose that ISPs can simply block websites that refuse to comply with the laws. That's what's going on in China, where websites are blocked primarily using DNS poisoning and SNI filtering. Previously they used keyword filtering and IP blocking, but in the modern world of CDNs and HTTPS being widely accepted, such methods are ineffective. The simple truth is, once ESNI and DNS over TLS become widely accepted, SNI filtering and DNS poisoning will no longer be possible. And that's already happening, nearly all browsers today, and many OS-es internally, support DNS over TLS, and quite a few modern browsers support ESNI. Once many websites start using ESNI, Internet censorship by governments and ISPs will be a thing of the past. And that will likely happen in a few years, if not months, sooner than the EU tries to enforce those new laws. Unless they are willing to block all the IPs of the CDNs that refuse to comply with their laws, or block all the servers that provide DNS over TLS, but those things seems very unlikely to happen (the government still has to use the Internet to spread its propaganda).
Article 11 can still be harmful, since Google and Bing will likely comply with it, and therefore probably stop indexing HRCAK and similar websites, but it's not like the Internet will become nearly useless without Tor or VPNs. I don't know what's your experience with DuckDuckGo, but I find it nearly useless. If I try to find some information about something that's currently happening in Croatia, I often get some completely irrelevant pages in, for example, Romanian, with words accidentally spelled similarly to the Croatian words I typed in as results at DuckDuckGo. Bing and Google do a lot better job at providing search results that are actually relevant to me.

Anyway, @brimstoneSalad, what do you think, why is trusting the common knowledge a good thing? Common knowledge is essentially a bunch of statements that are very hard or impossible to evaluate. "The Floyd's algorithm for the shortest distances in a graph runs in a time proportional to the cube of the number of nodes in a graph." is a claim that can be readily evaluated, it would be easy to show if it weren't the case. A claim "Latin 's' corresponds to Greek 'h' at the beginning of a word." is also relatively easy to evaluate, if it were false, you could find that out. Compare that to the claim that bombs exist, but that you can't buy one or make one yourself easily because of the laws. What can you do to evaluate that claim? Nothing, right? Then why would it be honest to accept that claim? The honest thing to do with that is to be agnostic about it.

Re: Article 13 and Article 11

Posted: Mon Jul 01, 2019 1:43 pm
by teo123
Also, @brimstoneSalad, regarding your claims of Croatia having a particularly bad government... Why isn't there a massive emigration from Croatia then? How come it is that people can so easily leave Croatia, yet they choose not to? You can travel from Croatia to Germany with just an identity card, you don't need any special permission from the government to do that. And if our education system is doing a good job at anything, then it is teaching foreign languages, so the language barrier isn't much of a problem. Yet not only people choose to stay in Croatia, quite a few people from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina come to Croatia for a better life. If life were so much better outside of Croatia, why would it be the case?
When I ask my fellow students about whether they want to move out of Croatia, I almost always hear the likes of "Ah, šta ću bit' auslender?" (Why would I want to be a foreigner?).

Re: Article 13 and Article 11

Posted: Wed Jul 03, 2019 6:46 am
by teo123
Anyway, @Jebus, @EquALLity and @Red, do you agree with me that, even if Vukovar and Srebrenica really happened, the NATO bombings of Belgrade (the operation "Milosrdni Anđeo") weren't justified?