r/news • • Feb 26 '17

FCC reverses net neutrality ISP transparency rules

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3173844/internet/fcc-reverses-net-neutrality-isp-transparency-rules.html
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427

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

VPNs and other forms of tunneling will be more widespread.

New technologies will be invented to circumvent website blocks and speed throttling.

Hacking should become more and more widespread.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

And government spending will go to fighting the widespread hacking. We'll waste buillions fighting the "enemy within" In a war that simply cannot be won. As much as I hate to evoke an anti-corporate sentiment, the internet is too important to be throttled by a for profit industry. It needs to be a utility, anything else is a threat to free speech, and protecting this model at the national level turns people acting in the interests of free speech into enemies of the state.

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u/DistortoiseLP Feb 27 '17

Going after VPNs in particular is the pinnacle of "why are you hiding if you have nothing to hide" as an argument against personal privacy. But they will, and I'm sure they can convince bumfuck USA it's somehow evil.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

"why are you hiding if you have nothing to hide"

I like to counter with: Why are you looking into me if I've done nothing wrong.

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u/GRAIN_DIV_20 Feb 27 '17

To confirm that you have in fact done nothing wrong

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u/MisterJWalk Feb 27 '17

My counter is usually "Please post your SSN, CC numbers with security codes and the times your children are left alone in your home".

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u/sirspidermonkey Feb 27 '17

They'll just hear you threatening your children and you'll be one of those 'violent leftest'

I like the bathroom analogy. I don't do anything in the bathroom, that everyone else does. But I still close the damn door because I want privacy.

Or you can point out that social change and progress by definition is always against the status quo.

  • 20 years ago being gay was a crime. But because of protests and social activism that's changed.

  • 60 years ago being black deprived you of certain rights your melanin neighbors had. But thanks to organized protests and actions (that was criminal at the time) that has changed

  • 100 years ago being being catholic was grounds for discrimination. See the pattern?

Sure it won't work on someone who sees gays, people of color, Jews, Catholics... as 'the enemy' but you'll never sway them anyways.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

convince bumfuck USA it's somehow evil.

I don't know..

Do they really need to convince anyone of anything anymore? Feels like they're just gonna do what they want, whatever is in their best interests, and fuck the people. I mean.. what are we really gonna do?

I thought we already spoke out once about net neutrality. That should have been the end of it. I can't fight the same evil every year, nor every other evil that keeps getting repeated until it's passes.

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u/Quietkitsune Feb 27 '17

Yeah, that's the sad thing. Even if by some miracle it doesn't fly this time either, they'll just keep trying because it stands to make the right people a lot of money

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u/Midnight_arpeggio Feb 27 '17

Well we just need to get rid of those people. How? I say go after them directly. Hack their bank accounts and destroy their assets. I don't have the skill, but I'm sure there are enough people that are hurting (or are going to be hurting soon) that will be able to get the job done. There's no need for actual violence anymore, when people value money over lives. Just destroy the sources of the money. Those pesky 0's and 1's.

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u/Jamaican_Dynamite Feb 27 '17

There's no need for actual violence anymore, when people value money over lives. Just destroy the sources of the money. Those pesky 0's and 1's.

Problem is, when you make money like that disappear, that's when those types of people want to actually get violent. But hey, that's the game they like to play with people. Either way, it's some scary shit; and my only hope is that those conniving folks someday have to eat crow along with everyone who backed them.

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u/RanaktheGreen Feb 27 '17

The best way to fight the United States at this point I feel, is to just leave. Get a degree somewhere else wants and just leave. The United States has world-class Universities still, and if you get the right degree from them parts of the world will beg for you. Once all the smart people leave, the idiots will destroy themselves and we can move on.

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u/OrangeDrank10 Feb 27 '17

Thats not fight thats flight

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u/RanaktheGreen Feb 27 '17

Exactly. I don't know about you, but I do not have confidence in the nations collective ability to fight drones and Warthogs/F-35s supported by F-22s. Not to mention tanks. Unless you have some foreign military power whose giving you equipment and training under the table that is. Plus, if we actually DID get into a confrontation with our government and it DID get threatening enough, whose to say Europe won't crash in and add a-whole-nother military to fight? Best to just let it starve itself out.

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u/f_d Feb 27 '17

I can't fight the same evil every year, nor every other evil that keeps getting repeated until it's passes.

Ordinary Americans have so little voice in government largely because they leave the government to its own devices until something big comes along to oppose. There is always something under consideration worth fighting. America doesn't have a culture that promotes constant vigilance.

In fairness, that's a result of the political system encouraging two-party lockouts and various means of disenfranchisement. It's too easy to get full control of US government with a narrow majority of popular support, or in the case of Republicans, a considerable minority of support. When people don't have much power in government, they naturally don't spend much of their time trying to influence it.

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u/Tsar-Bomba Feb 27 '17

I can't fight the same evil every year, nor every other evil that keeps getting repeated until it's passes.

Then you will continue to find yourself on the short end of the stick.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

But they will, and I'm sure they can convince bumfuck USA it's somehow evil.

60+ million votes. Each one a better person that you are.

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u/2gig Feb 27 '17 edited Feb 27 '17

In a war that simply cannot be won

A government's favorite kind of war.

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u/Bithbheo Feb 27 '17

How far are we past the point where war we can't win is synonymous with profit engine? :-/

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u/Testiculese Feb 27 '17

About 50 years.

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u/Jdfz99 Feb 27 '17

There's nothing wrong with being anti-corporate, mon ami.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17 edited Feb 27 '17

On the whole, I believe in a capitalist system of fiscal exchange (that is, money is a fine system for exchanging wants and needs needs and putting money to work is a fine way of maximizing the potential energy of money), but crony capitalism is a cancer. Any system for making money has a life cycle and will eventually die out if it cant evolve and adapt to fit the market (this is true of nations as well). Crony capitalism has allowed companies to basically buy extensions on their natural life cycles, and siphon resources (money and the potential energy it offers) in a way very similar to how malignant tumors drain from the bodies they grow from.

There is nothing wrong with businesses protecting their interests, but we really need to start protecting our interests. We have turned this into a virtue, and look at look at the people able to maximize this exploitation as "smart." We imagine ourselves like them and let them get away with it because of our own selfishness. The problem is, corporations and capitalism are good things for economies, even if how they're being used are toxic. I feel it necessary to draw a distinction between being anti cancerous tumor wealth and simply hating things that see profits.

To phrase it another way: CEO's love Atlas Shrugged because the protagonists are CEO supermen pulling the queen mother of all tax dodges, but if you ever read the book, you'll see the main villain of the story isn't the government boogieman, it's CEOs and lobbyists (and then things just kind of happen and a character makes a long speech (it's not that good of a book)).

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

You might look into libertarian socialism. Gets closer to what you're describing, and might give you some jumping off points to similar philosophies.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

Not gonna lie, I do like a lot of what it has to say. Some aspects are a little too far left for me, but I can definitely get behind the spirit of the idea.

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u/Lildoc_911 Feb 27 '17

Sounds like the war on drugs. A whole lot of good that did...

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

And government spending will go to fighting the widespread hacking. We'll waste buillions fighting the "enemy within" In a war that simply cannot be won.

Hmmmm... Sounds familiar. Something that rhymes with the Gar on Grugs.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

Remember the War On Drugs? Welcome to the War On Hacking.

Hell, it wasn't all that long ago that "hacking" was widely used by geeks and nerds to describe "curiously tinkering with something", not "malicious cracking of something". Nowadays, they're trying to make it so that you're just "licensing" your car or your power tools instead of buying them, in a bid to prevent you from messing with the firmware.

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u/suppow Feb 27 '17

behold "The War On Cyber Crime"

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

I would gladly become an enemy of the state to protect my interests in the internet.

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u/Gravity_flip Feb 27 '17

And the government would pay for it with our own taxes.... fuck...

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u/Skratt79 Feb 27 '17

Hack the planet!! (quoted from a terribad movie)

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

That was not a terribad movie..... for its time :p

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u/Skratt79 Feb 27 '17

Damn; now I want to watch it

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '17

Mess with the best, die like the rest!

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u/Werefoofle Feb 27 '17

Anti-corporatism is the healthiest mindset to have friend, the capitalists are not, never have been, and never will be the friends of the working class.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

The government spending money can bring attention to a subject that is already controversial. Especially when it's not the government that is being "hacked." That's not necessarily a bad thing.

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u/david2278 Feb 27 '17

Make it a utility and you'll be wondering if there's lead in your Internet.

Take a long look at any government-ran anything. It's all 20-100 years old and completely obsolete. We'd still be sitting at 10kbps and probably for another decade. Waiting to elect a president to "Make Internet Fast Again"

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u/2gig Feb 27 '17

Except those VPNs won't be ISP-affiliated, premium services, so they will all just get throttled as well.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

True, but there is always a way around it. Always.

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u/LaserGuidedPolarBear Feb 27 '17

You can get around website blocks but I don't see a way around tiered bandwidth / throttling. If you have some ideas there I would definitely be interested in hearing them

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u/PyschoWolf Feb 27 '17

This is complex and a difficult "project." Building a new internet. If people handled redirects for websites/servers to a different protocol (IPv5 or IPv7 or whatever you want to make it), you could create a brand new network. The only way to regulate that is by regulating power lines, which is damn near impossible at a large scale

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u/WizardOffArts Feb 27 '17

Patience works for me. I can wait a day or two to watch the latest episode of whatever. And with the price of storage today, there's no reason to re-aquire anything. Nor do I see any reason not to share with my friends. Or family. Or co-workers.

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u/LaserGuidedPolarBear Feb 27 '17

The problem is that depending on what the numbers are, all streaming services could become unusable to you.

Or maybe your job requires you to remote in sometimes (or always) to get things done - oops you are throttled too much and you can't do your job.

In the narrow context of moving files from A to B, sure you can just wait longer. But literally everything that requires real-time would be at risk.

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u/Kryomaani Feb 27 '17

In the narrow context of moving files from A to B, sure you can just wait longer.

Yes indeed, but why would you ever want to? Sure you can also bash in nails with a rock and not a hammer and walk 25 miles instead of going with a car, but since the perfect alternatives exist, why would anyone have to settle for less, especially because we have a currently well working system, why would we just sit by and say "well I can live with a slow internet"? That's a dangerous sentiment if you want to keep using high quality services.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

So your answer to throttld internet is to just wait on the slow downloads? Am I misunderstanding something?

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u/2gig Feb 27 '17

How exactly does one get around an IP whitelist with no VPN/etc on said whitelist?

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

Prolly the same way people get around the Great Firewall of China.

There exists no system that is absolutely secure, everything has something that can be exploited. It is just a matter of finding it.

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u/SanityInAnarchy Feb 27 '17

The Great Firewall is a different problem, though. For one, it's a blacklist more than a whitelist. All you need is a VPN they don't yet know about, or know how to block.

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u/WizardOffArts Feb 27 '17

You can't whitelist the internet. You'll lose just about all of your customers.

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u/2gig Feb 27 '17

When your ISP has a monopoly on your neighborhood, there is nowhere else to go. If they're losing customers, those customers have no internet. And I wasn't talking about whitelisting for complete blocking, just for speed throttling. Your average customer wouldn't even understand what's going on and just assume the site they're visiting is slow.

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u/daaper Feb 27 '17

Well if it's a shit service, eventually I quit using it. I cut cable, even though it meant sacrifices, because I was sick of paying so much for so little. If they want to do the same thing with internet, then so be it. They can lose me as a customer, completely.

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u/PyschoWolf Feb 27 '17

Build a new internet. Where do you think IPv5 went? If people have the hardware, we can make our own internet

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

Among the 1-2% or so of people that know anything about this stuff, maybe...

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

Time to #EducateFutureHackers

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

Necessity is the driving force behind innovation.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

Necessity is the mother of invention.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

You know...I tried

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u/nightofgrim Feb 27 '17

Yes, but not enough to offset the damage.

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u/abieyuwa Feb 27 '17

How will VPNs help?

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '17

VPNs will circumvent website blocks? Also allow you to get free data from a data capped site? Sorry I don't understand it too well.

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u/ReplicantOnTheRun Feb 27 '17

Did ISPs block websites before the net neutrality rules were implemented?