The capacity for abuse is huge, way beyong the potential benefits.
From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back to my european history, and I reach the Godwin point very quickly.
Those kind of people will abuse such system to prevent things to be shared.
It will be used for putting DRM on everything and create a more and more closed web.
It will be used by corporations and govs to prevent wisthleblowers and journalists to do their job. Or to prevent employees to get evidences of mistreatments in case they need to sue.
Because if you look at it, it's basically just a system for information control. And bad actors love that.
And of course it will be "for security reasons".
Trusting people with a terrible track record to not abuse a massive power in the future, espacially one that can be scaled up with the push of a button once the infrastructure is in place, is not a good bet.
> From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back to my european history, and I reach the Godwin point very quickly.
Books are not banned, just not used in the classroom anymore. While the reasons for it may be wrong, it's something that happens constantly all over the world. No one prevents children or adults to read those books at home. Banning books could mean that owning them is illegal and that just hasn't happened.
Banning their use in classrooms is lesser but still a step on that path, and the same Republicans trying to do that are not going to stop at schools after they win but will rather see that as an invigorating first step in a long campaign. For example, book sellers in Virginia are currently fighting a lawsuit against an attempt which would ban private sales:
As a bit of an Anarcho-Libertarian who is often in the middle of these conversations from either side, I would imagine part of the problem is your framing of this issue as if it is only coming from one direction, when there is plenty of evidence that both sides are into things like banning books[0] it's just a question of which books they want banned.
The both sides framing is a common tactic used to make this seem even but there’s a pretty notable difference if you look at the details. For example, Newsweek’s right-wing owners love this framing but the left example is a single school district removing a book from the curriculum whereas the right wing examples are far more widespread and include books being removed from libraries. The motives are also different: banning books which depict racism positively (highly debatable in this example) is different from banning them because they reflect existence of gay people in a positive manner.
According to the article that I linked, California has banned "To Kill a Mockingbird" in schools due to racism and you seem to be implying that is because the book "depict[s] racism positively"; however, I read it back in school and I remember discussing extensively how the book showed racism in a most negative light.
It doesn't seem to me like you are willing to believe that both sides could be over stepping here, but I personally am sure of it.
I remember the discourse around changing Jim's name in Huck Finn and banning To Kill a Mockingbird. Those changes and bans were wrong. But still the scope and intensity with which the extreme right are gunning for books is alarming. They're doing it more, it's more widespread, and they're using state power.
When "the left" has opposed books they try to use social pressure to get book settlers to voluntarily not stock those books. The right is currently using state power to prevent the teaching of certain books, their presence in public libraries, and are even suing to make private sales of certain books a crime in Virginia.
> Apparently no one told him that the stack of books in the photo included one banned in the state he leads, To Kill a Mockingbird, which was banned from California schools on the grounds that it contained racism.
Clear cut, right? Nope, here’s what their own linked article says:
> Schools in Burbank will no longer be able to teach a handful of classic novels, including Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, following concerns raised by parents over racism.
> Until further notice, teachers in the area will not be able to include on their curriculum Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor's The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
This is how the false-equivalence machine works. A single school district is expanded to an entire state (15k students isn’t nothing but it doesn’t represent many of the ~6M students in the state) and is presented as the equivalent of multiple state-wide attempts to remove books from schools & libraries, and again ignoring the difference between removing something from the curriculum with the goal of exclusion versus inclusion.
The urge to censor isn’t unique to right-wing politics but since they’re the ones pushing the most aggressively and successfully, I attributed more of it to the people causing the lion’s share of the harm.
OK then you agree that Amazon taking down Irreversible Damage was wrong, and that it should also be in every school library, or it's obviously a sign that the Left is going to ban books everywhere?
Removing something from a curriculum is not the same as banning it. There are many more books that are not in school libraries than there are books that are in them.
If you want to use the OS to ban a book or program or whatever, you don't need fancy hardware features, just a database of hashes pushed down via a software update. Apple wanted to do a version of this for CSAM images, it only didn't happen because they chose to tell users about it and got massive backlash. The implication that governments need more powerful DRM features to do something similar just obscures the fact that they could do it tomorrow if the US government gave up their free speech stances.
Chip manufacturers could even decide that nothing good happens on open source operating systems, so you're now only allowed to run Mac or Windows operating systems.
The point is really that they're taking full ownership of the chips from you.
They could, but not with the new Pluton stuff. That would be enforced with secure boot, which has been around for a while already. Again, the capabilities already exist. The barrier for a would-be censor is political not technological.
The EU just mandated chats to be scanned for content. Of course just for CSAM just as the meta data collection is only used for terrorism. Problem is that the latter is also used for parking tickets. They really try to hit the definition of a totalitarian state by the letter.
I doubt backlash will do anything. Regardless, the EU also mass collected personal data and made this behavior legal retroactively for authorities like Europol. The course for ever increasing surveillance has long been chosen. Government often disavows such decisions but that is exactly their strategy to implement such laws while evading criticism themselves.
Wider E2EE adoption was the only hope for clawing back some privacy for users who do everything on cloud services. If the EU bans E2EE and starts mandating all kinds of scanning of data stored on third party servers, it would be a massive loss.
I think it may have also been problematic legally for Apple. The US laws for CSAM are very strict and Apple wanted to do some sort of confirmation that the images are indeed CSAM which would have meant moving the images from the device to Apple servers.
If you're worried about book bannings in states like Florida, DeSantis is up for reelection in just over 3 months. Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).
Did they actually ban the books, or did they merely ban their usage in K-12 instruction with the news outlet rounding that up to a book ban for dramaturgical reasons? Not that a ban in school instruction is necessarily good (though, I would guess, not nearly as rare), but the actual full-fledged ban that DRM could aid in enforcing, which would prevent you as an individual from reading a book you want to read in _any_ plausible context, is on a different level.
All Florida did was add a criteria to their selection process to disallow books that include Critical Theory/Critical Race Theory or their praxis in the teaching of math, etc. Every state selects which text books can be used by their schools so if Florida "burns books" then by definition every single other state does too.
Where are the text books in California that teach math using Biblical stories and imagery? Obviously California burned all those books if we accept the argument being put forth with Florida.
Of course, bible stories would be inappropriate because superstition and religion have no place in schools. We're supposed to educate students about reality.
But there's nothing wrong with teaching students how they can use math to understand social problems and complex real-world issues. Math is a great tool for thinking about things like income inequality, climate change and economics.
Well since you opened that can of worms, CT/CRT is just another religion, and not a nice one.
Ibram X. Kendi, in his book “How to Be an Antiracist” states, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past
discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
The whole movement is predicated, explicitly, on instilling hatred and animosity on some out-group, it's a viscous ideology masquerading as compassion.
> All Florida did was add a criteria to their selection process to disallow books that include Critical Theory/Critical Race Theory or their praxis in the teaching of math, etc.
Yep, one state decided to do something about this divisive indoctrination of kids and the peddlers of that stuff obviously don't like it, hence the "banning (math) books" stories. If you actually read into this you quicky realize that someone is clearly lying and (this time) it's not the Republicans.
What, are about to tell me that well akshually crt is only taught at the uni level? Give me a break. This is the most basic of defenses you can use and it has been done countless times before. Obviously CRT (or CT in general) itself is not being taught to little kids, but the C(R)T praxis is. I.e. C(R)T "applied" to concepts kids can understand. I've seen the books/questionnaires that are being used for this purpose, do I have to list some them?
I mean, this isn't even about Republicans, Trumpians or whatever, any self-respecting liberal can't possibly subscribe to c(r)t and still call himself/herself a "liberal".
Deciding which textbooks that are going to be used in public schools isn't banning books. If you don't want the government to decide which books are used to teach your children then homeschooling or private schooling are what you should be focused on.
Technologists often have such tunnel vision that limits their concerns to tyranny driven by technology when there's plenty of low tech attacks on open society all the time.
It reminds me of the good old "my password takes 2 billion years to crack, but my kneecaps only take a few seconds" metaphor about people in tech forgetting that physical coercion is, in fact, a possible attack vector for your IT security.
The low tech attacks often have low tech workarounds. DeSantis may "ban" a math book but there's nothing stopping a Florida resident from buying it and giving it to a child. There's plenty of other marketplaces and similar publishers I can pull from.
When computing is controlled at a hardware level, you have far fewer competitors and market places. Working around things can be significantly more difficult and you may be stuck with scrapping up old less capable tech trying to do something you should have better options for. This is the reason technologists fear technology control, not so much because of tunnel vision but because the general population can't work around it, even experts may not be able to work around such protections. Low tech always has easy work arounds--the option exists even if you may fear the consequences.
Any such bans will always take the path of least resistance to cover the largest possible population with the easiest means. Pareto Style. And I care much more about those 80% of people having access over maintaining my own. Because ultimately, those people will set cultural standards of the future, not some technologist with their fully libre laptop.
And those attacks are, as of now, not that sophisticated or blatantly censoring. An overwhelming majority already do their computing on locked down devices (running iOS, Android and ChromeOS) and the big censorship wave hasn't hit them. Every half decade or so Amazon removes a book from Kindle as a side effect of capitalism and copyright and there's a huge HN thread mistaking it for deliberate censorship, but overall it really doesn't matter.
Also, let's be completely clear that DeSantis didn't ban math books. This was an attack on ideologically inconvenient books, mostly queer literature. It's part of the push to label us as "groomers" for merely existing around underage people that has caused a spike in violence and mistrust directed towards trans people. Once our rights are sufficiently eroded, they'll go after the gays again, and after that, maybe, we'll have progressed on the fascist cataclysmic us versus them rhetoric to revive blatant antisemitism. Or racism. Who knows. But safeguarding the high end bit of tech that is not even mainstream anymore wouldn't help society out of this and being concerned for it is a very individualistic choice.
While this is true for a few people, applying coercion on a mass scale using the kind of tech described in the article makes it much more convenient... so IMO the argument still holds
But I never said it's not a problem. I said the priorities are wrong.
Establishing technical means to do something (limiting access to files via DRM) is not as urgent as actually doing it (Florida carting books out of school libraries). And technology is not a monolith. Pluton specifically is far from being a universal requirement on Windows, and the entire PC platform is open enough to support alternatives for a very long time. It's possibly worrying (though it looks like Microsoft's intention is confidentiality management in enterprises for now), but far from "turnkey tyranny".
And we don't need guns to do a genocide. We managed to kill a good chunk of the american natives with mostly blades.
Yet, you probably don't want to give willingly a nuke to a dictator.
In the same way, giving this kind of power to people that have shown in the past to abuse information control is like banking on the wolf to behave in the hen this time.
> Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).
I'm not in the US. I just read those crazy news, compare it to my grandfather stories, and worry.
banking on the wolf to behave in the hen [house] this time
Fair point, but the United States is rapidly moving towards authoritarian governance right now. There are steps that every U.S. citizen who reads my comment can take to help stop this decline immediately. I don't like the idea of this sort of TPM 3.0 module in my computer's hardware, but it's a 'day after tomorrow' problem for me, not a 'right now' problem.
A good illustration of how devastating epidemics in North America among the natives were is that when the first European explorers reached the coast on the west side of what is now the United States they found that part of the continent to be highly populated.
That was in the early 1500s. It was another couple hundred years before Europeans started colonizing and conquering those areas. By the time that started those populations were already reduced by around 90% from diseases that has spread across the continent from the Europeans on the east side.
Before those diseases wiped out so many natives no European colonists were able to survive in what is now the US and Canada without the approval and help of the natives. If the local natives didn't want a colony there, they removed it.
Yes, the colonists had guns and the natives then did not but the guns in those times weren't actually superior to bows and arrows. The guns might have better range, but their accuracy was much worse and they took longer to reload.
Before diseases that the colonists (unintentionally) brought greatly weakened the native tribes pretty much the only colonists that did OK were those that allied with a native tribe.
There were a bazillion tribes, and there was a lot of conflict between them including warfare. Some smaller tribes that were losing their wars with bigger tribes allied with some of the colonies to try to get help against the bigger tribes. Those were the colonies that were allowed the stay and thrive.
For a great look at what life was like in the New World before Europe became widely aware of it, and what happened afterwards the book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C Mann is quite good.
>I can't fathom a math textbook with pornographic examples. Is this a thing in the US?
I've been out of school for quite a while, but AFAIK while there is plenty of porn out there, it's not in our math books.
No, it's just Florida politicos pandering to their base[0].
I'm guessing that what GP is going on about (please do correct me if I'm wrong) is probably some word problems that include references to non-heterosexual/non-binary folks, which seems to trigger the intolerant among us.
Which is a result of decades of attempts to put christian dogma and ideology back into US public schools, and failing that, destroy the public school system.
according to an article linked elsewhere (https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-ba...) it was because they had too many black people depicted as athletes and they had word problems that treated scientific facts as if they were scientific facts.
The one example that I thought might have been somewhat improper was "Multiple exercises related to a debate between Al Gore and Rush Limbaugh, where the publisher was in favor of Al Gore's arguments based on the questions in the exercises."
If the debate in question was fictional, I'd be tempted to agree it would have been better to avoid using the names of real people although I'd disagree that is enough to ban the use of the textbooks. If the debate was actual and the textbook pointed out very real flaws with Rush Limbaugh's logic (especially if they were a real world example of bad math) I'd say that it makes perfect sense to include it in a math text book.
It depends on who is defining what is pornographic. To some of the swivel-eyed loons deep in the religious right, who are very vocal in these matters, all material depicting non-heterosexual people doing anything other than being deeply unhappy or being subject to a stoning, is pornographic. This means examples in textbooks that attempt to be inclusive can fall foul of their ire.
Mein Kampf is a banned book which I don't think many would disagree with. There are many other such books filled with propaganda that are rightly banned. I don't see why other propaganda-filled books that are being pushed on unsuspecting children shouldn't be banned too, unless the only reason is that you dislike the direction of the propaganda.
Mein Kampf is not banned in my country, I can buy it, and I think everybody should be able to read it.
You cannot defend against something you don't understand.
Reading it (or the little red book), you will notice there is nothing incredible about it.
It's a good way to understand the banality of evil.
It's a good way to see what currently in our society echoes it: we are not freed from evil, it can come back any time.
And the "push on unsuspecting children" narrative is worn out. Nobody push such dangerous book on children unless already twisted. Nobody ever told me "read it, it's good for you". Everybody always said: "dangerous book, read it with history in mind", if they ever talked about it.
I don't even think it's banned in Germany anymore. If I remember correctly it was banned for a while, but the ban was lifted and people bought it up like crazy. Not because they were Secret Nazis all along, but because people really hate being told they aren't allowed to access certain ideas. It's human nature to want to know the things you're forbidden from learning about.
If today it's "obvious" what's bad; When this generation dies off, who is appointed master of the universe and decides what's bad? It won't be you. It'll be the guys with the money; See Pluton. They're already paving the way for just that (at least in tech and what your wallet must must must spend). But, I digress.
You shouldn't ban books. You should teach morals.
My friend, Swim, who is a Jew living in Israel doesn't support banning Mein Kampf. So much so that when Swim's friend ordered it from Amazon, neither opposed it. Curriculum teaches about Hitler's rise to power and the abuse of his people to do so. That's more than enough to understand not to follow in his footstep. Swim's friend was interested in Hitler's political prowess.
I'm not interested in Mein Kampf. But, if someone is, he most surely has the right to read it. Kill the way some fanatics did because of it? No, that's immoral.
Who decides morality? That's complex, I think. But, I also think it is an innate intuition that lives in all of us.
I think many would disagree with the banning of it, not based on its contents but based on the principle of not banning books in general and not banning speech that’s unpopular.
Unpopular speech needs more protection than popular speech, not less.
If you're in the US there are not really any truly banned books. There are books that are banned from certain libraries (mostly school libraries).
But, imagine that a school adopts the DRM processes described in the article and requires this study level of control even on personal devices that are used for school. Suddenly those book bans can be enforced digitally by the school and will totally cut off access to certain books that the school chooses.
You might say that it's within the school's rights to do this for a device that is used for school and if you don't like it then use a different device. Now that's a system where there is a class-divide on the information that one is physically able to consume on their devices.
You might think Mein Kampf is ban-worthy, but the whole point is actually that you should not ban any book at all, because once you start banning books it becomes far too easy for more books to be banned. All it will take is one regime change in a school district's PTA for new books, that you maybe think should not be banned, to be added to the list.
It's worth considering the most banned books in America. His Dark Materials. A fantastic young adult fantasy novel that pokes harder at religion than some Christians can bear.
> But, imagine that a school adopts the DRM processes described in the article and requires this study level of control even on personal devices that are used for school.
The prerequisite for this to happen is that the school removes all physical editions of the books and has digital editions for all content, and a lending program for the books that is sufficient to satisfy publishers... and all students have digital book readers able to access the school library.
I don't see this happening in the near (or even within the decade) future. There is far too much content that is physical only, publishers haven't embraced digital editions for libraries, school libraries don't have the technical resources (physical or in many cases human) to convert their collections to digital.
The hypothetical school book ban for digital editions is needlessly alarmist.
When those resources are available to schools, then yes - lets talk about it... though the school banning books will continue to mean "that resource isn't in our collection" and a student can go to another library (or in many cases book store) and get a copy of that book for themselves. This is no different than today.
It's not banned here in the US[0][1][2]. Nor should it be IMHO.
I say that as a person of Eastern European/Jewish extraction.
Do I like fascists/fascism? No. Do I like Nazis? No.
But I do like freedom of expression. And if the price of that freedom is that hateful scumbags get to speak their piece, that's okay with me. But I'll have something to say about it too. As it should be.
Mein Kampf was not banned in Germany either. It is just that after Hitler's death, having no heirs, the state of Bavaria got the printing rights and decided not to allow printing of them (there was a heavily commented version made for academics like a study bible). Meaning all prints violated copyright until the book enters public domain.
District councils (so the second 'lowest' of the possible tiers) but yes. In practice, they've all deferred to the judgement of the British Board of Film Classification (née ...Film Censorship) for nearly every film since it was set up.
From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back to my european history, and I reach the Godwin point very quickly.
Those kind of people will abuse such system to prevent things to be shared.
It will be used for putting DRM on everything and create a more and more closed web.
It will be used by corporations and govs to prevent wisthleblowers and journalists to do their job. Or to prevent employees to get evidences of mistreatments in case they need to sue.
Because if you look at it, it's basically just a system for information control. And bad actors love that.
And of course it will be "for security reasons".
Trusting people with a terrible track record to not abuse a massive power in the future, espacially one that can be scaled up with the push of a button once the infrastructure is in place, is not a good bet.