Thank you, Jacques. Nobody else was thinking that. Very insightful. Much better that we talk about Wikileaks... again... than discuss a programmable dynamic DNS service run by one of the largest tech companies on the Internet.
I think Amazon trying to sell a mission critical service like DNS right after rolling over at the first prod from some politician (and a pretty lousy one at that) serves as a good reminder that if you want to use services from them you'd better make sure that you are not going to do anything at all that challenges the powers that be or you'll be out faster than a warrant can be served.
Service providers of all sorts should stand by their customers until a court order to the contrary is served, especially when institutions like the EFF are solidly on the side of those customers.
Amazon trying to sell a mission critical service like DNS right after rolling over at the first prod from some politician
I think it's pretty clear that Amazon didn't roll over because of Lieberman's remarks. Rather, Amazon did what they did because they thought it was the right to do: "it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy".
I understand you're passionate about this, but let's not conflate what actually happened.
Joe Lieberman called Amazon and said [something] to them.
Late that evening, Wikileaks was cut off.
The next day, Lieberman put out a press release: "This morning Amazon informed my staff that it has ceased to host the Wikileaks website. I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier based on Wikileaks’ previous publication of classified material. The company’s decision to cut off Wikileaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies Wikileaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material. I call on any other company or organization that is hosting Wikileaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them."
Lieberman's spokesperson added: "Senator Lieberman hopes that what has transpired with Amazon will send a message to other companies."
The next day, Lieberman introduced a bill in Congress that would make it a Federal crime to do what Amazon was doing, hosting the Wikileaks material.
You could characterize that as "pretty clear that Amazon didn't roll over because of Lieberman", but that characterization would be utterly mendacious.
They actually were pretty careful about that from what I gather, with the 5 news agencies they worked with telling them how to redact them and what to release:
You're attempting to make the argument that newspapers (most of which are not even American) can make accurate judgements about the effects of releasing US intelligence. That's a poor argument. What is it about news agencies that qualifies them to make such judgments? Compare this to the Pentagon Papers where someone with intimate knowledge of the situation decided what to leak.
Regardless, that doesn't change the fact that your original claim that Amazon rolled over because of Lieberman is false and unsubstantiated.
Where did the US gain the moral ground here, such that only US papers would be best judges? Almost everything the US does has large effects in the rest of the world. I think it's a very good thing that US media isn't in control of the story.
Did you even bother to read the post I wrote? The thrust of the argument is that no paper is the best judge. In fact, newspapers are categorically unqualified to make judgments in this case.
If that's the best "proof" you have, it's not even worth discussing. Amazon explicitly denied that they booted Wikileaks because of Lieberman. Lieberman isn't even saying that either. He's claiming that his staffers, were informed by Amazon, which probably is an exaggeration.
Sorry, but until you show me more proof than the verbal statements of one of the most corrupt US Senators, I'm not convinced it actually even happened.
If the conversation was about anything else, using only the word of Joe Lieberman as proof would be a joke. I'm honestly shocked that you think my standards are exacting.
This is why Wikileaks is needed. You're so brainwashed by the current political system you're willing to take a politician's words at face value. The only way we'd know what actually happened is if someone leaked Lieberman's communications with Amazon, and Amazon's internal communications about the issue.
>ISP that is also a jury to content that is not a clear case is evil.
User: Amazon, I found child pornography on one of your hosted pages.
Amazon: Sorry we're not legal experts we'll keep the content until a court case delivers a verdict.
Yeah, right.
You're living in cloud cuckoo land if you believe that an ISP has to forgo all moral judgement on content and only remove or deny hosting if something is proven to be illegal.
Repost #3 (I should make this into a macro or something): This is a threaded comment system. We can have as many discussions about something (post or other comment) as we want: go off on wild tangents, point out the spelling, have a pun thread, mention patterns of blogging/commenting the parent fits into, reply to the author on a separate subject, share anecdotes related to the subject of the post, and actually talk about the content of a post or comment, all at the same time, without breaking anything. That's what's so neat about threaded discussion: it doesn't require the "comparative notability" that a linear conversation needs in order to function.
jacquesm's comment (and this thread descending from it) does not in any way take away from our ability to talk about Route 53 as a technology.
Don't repost that comment again; it's wrong. 67 of 127 comments on this thread are about Wikileaks; just as importantly, the first 40% of the thread is dedicated to a pointless political argument ("Did Joe Lieberman shut down Wikileaks? Did you know government documents can't be copyrighted?") that have nothing to do with the story.
"The first 40% of the thread" is not dedicated to Wikileaks; one comment branch is. This page is a tree, not a list, and should be treated as such. It currently has 27 children, 3 of which mention Wikileaks.
That you have to scroll past the entirety of those 3 children's discussion to get to what interests you is an incident of the way the comment tree is rendered by default. If tangential threads started collapsed and had to be expanded (assuming there's come clever way to detect tangential threads, or just people such as yourself to tag them), your complaint would vanish, with no change to the ratio of Wikileaks posts:"on-topic" posts.
And just as, well, a tangential argument: if someone is planning to avoid using all AWS products, they will avoid using this one as well, thus making such avoidance relevant to the story. What you're reacting to is the fact that the topic has already been beaten to death in other HN threads, not that it's particularly irrelevant to this one. For a while now, I've been thinking that we need some form of super-threading (such that article posts which form a sequence will have a single, merged comment thread), but now I'm starting to think we need aspect-oriented threading as well—such that this sub-thread, with its connection between this article and Wikileaks, would actually appear in the comments of both super-threads, and if you had hit "ignore" on the Wikileaks thread, the comments in here that also apply to it would disappear. Sound workable?
I don't disagree with anything you have to say here. The problem is, you're talking about how things would work on a site that isn't Hacker News, and I'm talking about how things are not working on a site that is.
I think it's fair to say, even from the perspective of an impartial observer (I'm not one), that Wikileaks ran this whole comment thread off the rails. This is a discussion about what will probably be the biggest news about DNS over the next 2 quarters, and DNS has --- literally --- taken a back seat to someone trying to explain to Jacques what Joe Lieberman represents in US politics.
The arguments in favor of injecting WL into these discussions strike me as very similar to the arguments Ron Paul advocates used to inject Paul into discussions in early 2008.
True, I don't think it's working as-is. I'm picturing HN the way it could be, and it's clouding my judgement of its current UX (I picture "jumping down to the next sibling node to this node" as a single atomic action, so my brain doesn't record the time I spend doing it.) And, since people had to scroll so far to get to something relevant, they were more likely to give up and comment on the tangential sub-thread instead, which deprives the relevant threads of comments (assuming posters that don't read the entirety of the discussion.)
However, we do have the Arc source; what is needed now is a good incentive to actually implement/fix this stuff, other than just scratching itches (because if that was enough, it would have been done by now.) "A competitor to HN that does it, runs ads, steals traffic, and makes money" wouldn't work, because the value of HN is 99% the community...
I respect and admire the ingenuity and initiative HN hacker-types have, but also recognize that those qualities tend to lead to feature-y tech-y solutions to every problem.
The problem we're having isn't technical. It's simply bad-faith comments: comments made to advance an agenda (along the theme of "what's the point of a silent boycott", ie, "yes, we're protesting, not discussing the actual topic") instead of a topical discussion. In the WL case, the fact that WL approval trends 3-1 in favor means those bad-faith comments get jacked up in rank.
This thread is also a non-topical digression from Amazon Route 53, but the whole HN item is a lost cause and the meta discussion about how HN is mishandling this is more valuable than what's actually leading here --- again: arguments about Joe Lieberman.
If I were a different sort of HN user, I'd post a "Tell HN: Please Stop With The Wikileaks Stuff". But we all know what would happen if that got posted: two Lieberman discussions.
> But we all know what would happen if that got posted: two Lieberman discussions.
And that's the thing... you can't expect people to not try to advance their own agendas. You have to make a system that's robust in the face of human nature, not expect humans to subvert their nature to use the system. There will always be something like Wikileaks (on Reddit, that something is omnipresent pun threads that can sometimes eat ten pages before you find the rest of the discussion) and asking the userbase to stop won't help (I don't think...) as long as it doesn't visibly harm anyone the user cares about ('round here, if pg says stop, you'd stop, because he's in everyone's Monkeysphere, but that's not a principle that can work in every forum.) In the tragedy of the commons, the best solution is to get better commons.
The only part of this comment thread that you are posting in is exactly rhe one about whose length you complain so loudly, and it would have been at least 50% shorter if you had not done so.
You did not discuss anything whatsoever in the rest of this thread and in spite of 'leaving people to help themselves to the last word' you keep coming back for more.
The Wikileaks incident is pretty good example of the risks of a "cloud model". Same sort of warrantless dropping of service will happen to you when something you've built is deemed undesirable (but not necessarily illegal) by the authorities.
Build a web service that people may use to share links related to piracy, or photos that may be pornographic, and you'll experience the same.
Amazon's policy is the Apple App Store all over again.
Privacy is hot in the echo chamber. Most of the world isn't scared by Facebook; it owns its market utterly. Similarly, nothing Amazon does vis a vis WL is going to make a dent in its numbers. A substantial chunk of Amazon's market thinks "Wikileaks is a traitor"; they may pick up yardage.
So is there a userscript for HN that provides Reddit-style "collapse this thread" buttons? I think that's all we really need to keep everyone happy here.
They have a Terms of Service, and like (literally) every hosting provider on the planet, they will take down your site if you violate the agreement that you agreed to when you signed up.
And like every other webhosting provider on the planet they'll have to decide when they think it is time to stand up for their customers and when to let it go.
Suppose you have a newspaper and you want to co-locate, Amazon is suddenly no longer an option.
Really, the speed and ease with which they rolled over after some political pressure is quite amazing to me, I had them pegged as 'solid' before.
If they were solid in your experience in the past, perhaps this time there were special mitigating factors in this case we are not aware of, or have not recognized?
One thing that pops to mind is WikiLeaks was promising to expose the secrets of all big businesses everywhere. It makes no sense whatsoever for Amazon to support someone promising to do that, unless Amazon has no secrets they wish to keep.
esp considering that they spent a few days defending the child pedo guide on the grounds of free speech
The Guardian used Amazon to host the app they built that allowed readers to filter through and flag the Afghan war logs. No takedown from Amazon there!
Even the Neo Nazis have a right to free speech. And they're despicable too. That does not mean that free speech as such is wrong, just that some speech is reprehensible.
It was somewhat craven of them, on the other hand; I can see it from their point of view Senator Lieberman can make life very difficult for them vis-a-vis local sales tax charged on goods sold across state lines. In my mind Amazon is reacting in a way that protects their short-term interests but they do not realize that they have now given a clear signal that they will cave to pressure.
BS, if they hosted the NYT and the NYT posted a leaked document, they wouldn't take them down. It all depends on power relations, perceived legitimacy, etc.; the only thing it has nothing to do with is their terms of service.
I too think Amazon wouldn't have taken down the NYT.
On the other hand, had WL not violated the AWS AUP, I also don't think Amazon would have taken them down, either.
The point is, if you don't violate the Amazon ToS, this is a non-issue (outside of personal politics, which is a fine reason not to do business with them, but a bit out of scope for this discussion.)
If you post public-domain material to your site, you don't "own, or otherwise control all the rights" to it. There is no jurisprudence that says posting public-domain material isn't exactly what Wikileaks did. (People with security clearance have been successfully prosecuted for publicly leaking/publishing classified information; no recipient lacking security clearance ever has)
If the rest of the TOS is full of stuff like that, it would be doubtful it would even be possible to run a significant site without in some way violating the TOS. According to that TOS, one user-submitted comment of copyrighted content and your website could immediately be permanently pulled, even if you took the comment down as fast as humanly possible.
>If you post public-domain material to your site, you don't "own, or otherwise control all the rights" to it.
I think you'll find that you do.
You own that copy that you are presenting for distribution, no one else owns it nor has rights over it, you do (at least in copyright terms, PD could still have trademark and other issues).
The right to prevent other people copying it is exhausted, there is no [copy]right there to own so it's not a legal right that you don't have. That other people own other copies and have control of all the available rights to their copies is immaterial.
That said I think you're clutching at straws classified documents are not in the public domain unless they have been published by someone with the right to do so and the copyright term in the relevant jurisdiction has expired.
There are about 30 states IIRC that aren't signatories to Berne Convention or relevant parts of TRIPS, etc..
[if] one user-submitted comment of copyrighted content and your website could immediately be permanently pulled, even if you took the comment down as fast as humanly possible.
Does that sound credible to you? Does that seem like a reasonable comparison? I'm done arguing about WL on a thread about a new Amazon web service now.
What exactly was the violation of the ToS again? Honest question, I really don't know.
At any rate, I'd amend your "if you don't violate the ToS" to "if you don't attract a phone call from a cranky old senator's office", since that's what seems to have prompted the action.
Right, except Wikileaks did not violate the TOS. Classified material cannot, by law, be copyrighted. Once leaked, it is public domain. Amazon's claim otherwise was completely disingenuous and dishonest.
Is classification copyright? I get the feeling that people are conflating the two issues. I don't know if classification goes with copyright but my general sense is that they aren't linked.
I'd say disclosure of classified information presents a greater risk than distributing copyrighted materials. I really don't think "copyright" is the issue at all here.
Humans generally argue to seek truth or status or both. It's a disaster that status-seeking gets involved in the process of truth-seeking, and I wish that we all would recognize that and avoid it when we can (to the extent that we can). "Please, help yourself to the last word" strikes me as motivated by status competition.
Try taking the words at their face value, instead. The motivation is avoiding another 20-comment thread that spends 70% of its time dancing around the subtext of one commenter liking WL and the other commenter not liking WL.
Try what Wikipedia tries to do: Assume Good Faith. There are people on HN I, too, have a hard time doing that with, so if you're not assuming good faith because of a 'tptacek issue, please feel free to email me about it.
Pedantry doesn't suit this discussion well. You are correct that the word copyright was not specified. What was specified was that they hosted content they do not own.
By this standard, I fully expect AWS to terminate services to EVERY SINGLE forum, review site, message board, webmail service, and any other site that does not explicitly state in their own terms of service that every byte of user-generated content is the exclusive property of the site itself.
In addition, I expect any AWS customer hosting IETF RFCs, software with public domain licenses, and public domain poetry to be shut down immediately.
If AWS fails to do this, they are being discriminatory and capricious in pursuing TOS violations.
Your reply seems pedantic as well. All your examples have implicit or explicit permission from the authors for the sites to post their material, as I'm sure you're well aware of.
The agreement states you must "own or otherwise control all rights to the content". Merely having permission to display the content is not sufficient.
If I were to be cynical, I'd say that the purpose of that clause is to allow Amazon to take down any site they want and have a credible excuse. Realistically it's probably just some over-zealous lawyer, but either way it has that very effect (as Amazon has demonstrated).
What saddens me is that people are parroting this "violated ToS" line without even thinking about it. It doesn't matter whether you support WL or not; but at least do the bare minimum and _think_ about what you're writing? Where in the ToS does it say that "site can't host classified information" ? And why hasn't NYT's access be pulled yet, because NYT is serving the _same_ documents ?
Here's a fact: US Government publications can't be copyrighted. Period.
So while Amazon tries to hide behind these lies, they're also busy making money off of books about similar "leaks", like the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, etc.
Yes, thank you! Amazon could've easily told them they're going to wait for a court order since that is what's needed to prove Wikileaks was in the wrong here. Clearly, they shouldn't have rejected them as fast as they did when it was sucha controversial issue.
Even the paedophile book lasted longer than Wikileaks on Amazon. This should speak volumes about the political pressure Amazon was under when Lieberman called.
Totally agreed. Using Amazon services for anything that involves content that could potentially offend the government of any country looks pretty risky right about now.
