[tor-talk] Tor and Google error / CAPTCHAs.

Mirimir mirimir at riseup.net
Fri Oct 7 17:59:06 UTC 2016


On 10/07/2016 05:50 AM, Jon Tullett wrote:
> On 7 October 2016 at 13:21, Mirimir <mirimir at riseup.net> wrote:
>> Reddit, in contrast, is a total free-for-all
> 
> It really varies. Some subreddits are VERY heavily moderated, some are
> completely open, most are somewhere in between. Your experience of
> reddit is probably quite personal and likely to be different from any
> other user. It's a big space. That's kinda off-topic, but it's
> relevant in the bigger picture, I think.

True. Better would have been to say that it _can_ be a total
free-for-all. I mostly follow /r/VPN/ and /r/TOR, which are both rather
heavily moderated. Otherwise, I was going from what I've read about
Reddit's off-and-on efforts to manage rogue subreddits.

> It's been very interesting, over the last couple of decades, to
> observe the changing attitudes to censorship and control in online
> communities. For me it started in the days of BBS and Usenet, and
> thereafter different communities evolved in very different ways.
> Community norms in areas like community policing, netiquette, topic
> enforcement, language, personal privacy...all became very different,
> and vastly more varied. And, of course, we have rather different
> attitudes from law enforcement/intelligence to those communities and
> their platforms, and very different commercial ideas too.

I caught Usenet just on the cusp of Eternal September. It was a dramatic
transformation. And so much greater need for moderation :(

> I find tracking that historical change to be useful because it reminds
> me that our expectations in the future will be different too. Our
> notions of privacy and security, for example, are far from static; we
> can't take a snapshot of the market today and assume it's either
> inherently "correct" (for some definition), nor unchanging. In
> context, I'm interested in how that affects the evolution of
> communities/services like Tor.

It's arguably not very useful to consider "our notions of privacy and
security", because they're so diverse. People in small communities may
have virtually no privacy. People in large cities have grown accustomed
to privacy and relative anonymity. The Internet isn't as private as many
people assume. Maybe it was, back in the day, but that's just because
ISPs weren't looking. And it took a while for the NSA to master Internet
interception and data analysis. Anyway, some of us care, but the masses
remain clueless.

> -J
> 


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