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EU Tells Internet Archive That Much Of Its Site Is 'Terrorist Content' (techdirt.com)
Mike Masnick, reporting for TechDirt: We've been trying to explain for the past few months just how absolutely insane the new EU Terrorist Content Regulation will be for the internet. Among many other bad provisions, the big one is that it would require content removal within one hour as long as any "competent authority" within the EU sends a notice of content being designated as "terrorist" content. The law is set for a vote in the EU Parliament just next week. And as if they were attempting to show just how absolutely insane the law would be for the internet, multiple European agencies (we can debate if they're "competent") decided to send over 500 totally bogus takedown demands to the Internet Archive last week, claiming it was hosting terrorist propaganda content. [...] And just in case you think that maybe the requests are somehow legit, they are so obviously bogus that anyone with a browser would know they are bogus. Included in the list of takedown demands are a bunch of the Archive's "collection pages" including the entire Project Gutenberg page of public domain texts, it's collection of over 15 million freely downloadable texts, the famed Prelinger Archive of public domain films and the Archive's massive Grateful Dead collection. Oh yeah, also a page of CSPAN recordings. So much terrorist content!
To the publishing companies, ANYTHING freely available is terroristic content.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Just put a message for EU ip addresses that reads something like:
"Due to EU Committee X takedown notice 123456 claiming this site had "terrorist content", we have blocked this content for EU readers. Our internal review of the site found it did NOT qualify for a take-down, but to avoid legal hassles, we decided to block it for now. You can donate to our legal defense fund at [url here]. We apologize for the inconvenience."
Further, publish a list on the Internet Archive site of all take-down requests, including a note marking the dubious requests. The Streisand Effect will then kick in and the EU review committee will end up embarrassed as those who can read the blocked content overseas can know about their poor decision.
Table-ized A.I.
From TFA:
CORRECTION: This post previously identified the sender of the 550 falsely identified URLs as Europolâ(TM)s EU Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU). The sender was in fact, the French national Internet Referral Unit, using Europolâ(TM)s application, which sends the email from an @europol.europa.eu address. The EU IRU has informed us that it is not involved in the national IRUsâ(TM) assessment criteria of terrorist content.
So it's actually just the French, not the EU.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
A few people, some very small fraction of something far less than 1% of a population of 7.5+ billion people are going to decide something that affects/constrains the populations access to a massive amount of information.
Where/When have we seen this sort of act before in our human history? i.e. Library of Alexandria
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Dear Government Authority,
We have reviewed your request regarding the alleged "terrorist" content on our website, and found the request to be baseless and nonsensical. As a result, your agency has been placed on our "incompetent authority" list. All future requests from your organization will be ignored.
If you believe your organization has been placed on the "incompetent authority" list in error, please send a certified letter stating your petition along with a 125 Euro processing fee to our legal department.
Good Day,
The Internet Archive
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
1) robots.txt retroactively will delete things from the archive. Just create one telling the archive to skip certain content, and the archive will obey.
2) I just spent the past couple weeks digging up over 20 years of my own history thanks to the Internet Archive. All of this was previously published software, some 70 different projects. I've been pulling their archive and a couple others, mixing it all together, organizing it, and republishing a lot of the old software projects online via GitHub so anyone can use them freely. Hell, to be entirely honest, half of these projects I had even forgotten I did! Without the archive, all of this would have been lost. Now that the code is in git repositories, I've been able to quickly and easily mirror it to several places and properly archive it myself. They're a godsend!
Firstly it was corrected to not say "EU" but "French national Internet Referral Unit" for which I can find no reference beside that article. There IS an EU IRU, but no french national IRU I can find of. So baring a proper reporting I am viewing that as dubious.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
You ever look into history? The reason we write things down is because it is or was important. "On the internet" doesn't change much with writings except the method of writing.
Just like what another poster said, the Internet Archive respects robots.txt and will retroactively delete a site if you set it that way.
Also even though the written texts are on a different medium, digitally versus paper, some writings will hold huge historical value; to suggest otherwise would be akin to burning books because they're "blasphemous" or something similar, and while you might want that for your own data most people would want this historical backup, especially scholarly sites like Wikipedia and the public domain books that can be distributed freely forever.
His invention decimated the livelihoods of THOUSANDS of monks!
#DeleteChrome
Maybe content hosts should simply geoblock the whole the EU with a message of explaining the outcome of this?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I find it very strange, how ALL countries got so paranoid and totalitarian and just plain nuts and evil since between 1998 and 2006.
Those countries look like they couldn't be more different. Yet the somehow all follow the same path.
Seriously, what the hell?
Yeah, I put on my tin foil hat, with its perfect parabolic concentrator shape. ;)
But you face what is *really* just a plain verifiable fact of reality, and verify it for yourself, in exchange.
So far Republicans aren't advocating "punching commies" or trying to take down Project Gutenberg.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
a right-leaning prankster with "authority" as defined by the European Parliament decides to send out mass demands for removal of far-leftist content
While I might agree that C-SPAN leans left, I'm fascinated to hear that you think the entire Gutenberg collection is "far-leftist content".
A bunch of goathearders with small arms have brought both Russia and the US to unending frustration in Afganistan.
You're a tard.
The Internet Archive's robots.txt policy was amended two years ago. They now ignore robots.txt policies and want people to make a formal request to remove a site's archive. What's been unclear (to me) if this corrected the issue of new robots.txt files making old archives of sites unavailable. What often happen(ed|s) is a domain squatter picks up an expired domain that used to host something, blocked IA, and then IA would make all of that site's archives unavailable. This almost always meant content a previous owner of the domain had hosted.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Shut up! Don't give the R's any more crazy ideas about the interwebnet thing. I think they're still hung up on the idea of a bunch of pipes and that was too complex for them to understand.
Why is Snark Required?
https://www.theguardian.com/po...
Because for the most part of its history it has been a demockracy at best.
Since the UK is a state, it would mean that it has a tradition of refusing to be told what to do by itself. Fair enough, the current shitshow where the parliament refuses every possible option shows exactly that. But that's not quite something to be proud of.
Yep. So the citizens of the UK would see that while their own government prefers not to invest in the poorest regions of the country - and they are often poorer than Romania - the EU does. Which makes these regions voting for Brexit and them consequently become even poorer really funny - at least for those who don't live in the UK.
Since, as you have mentioned previously, the political and media class in the UK is very different from the EU (and very anti-EU), I call bullshit.
Given the questionable quality of the English political class the UK really ought to be run by foreigners - they simply make better decisions. That was true during the times of the Normans, that was true when England was ruled by the Dutch and the Germans and it is just as true today.
You won. Deal with it.
Oh, by the way. I'm still waiting for the riots you guys have promised if the UK wouldn''t leave on the 29th of March. As far as I know this is called "all mouth and no trousers" in your country.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Look at the UK.
They are bent into a pretzel, imprisoning their citizens for misgendering trans people, or stating a basic fact about Islamic extremism.
It is terrifying knowing that those same bumbling fascist imbeciles have access to weapons of war with no check from their own citizens.
I regularly see violence advocated against the left. Free helicopter rides ring a bell?
Moreover though, forget advocating violence, alt-right terrorism is actually happening, which, a tiny number of exceptions aside, isn't happening on the reverse. The right wing are shooting up schools and Yoga studios because they hate women and/or blacks. They're burning down black churches. They're shooting up the people inside other black churches. They're shooting up Waffle Houses. They're sending bombs to CNN and Democratic congressmen and women and even anti-Trump celebrities.
And I want to make something clear: this isn't a "Nuh, your side is worse" thing. This is a "The fact you are this out of touch is why the violence is happening thing." Somehow, perhaps because of the news sources you choose, perhaps because you're tuning it out, you're ignoring the extreme violence perpetuated by the alt-right over the last three or more years. And that's making it easy for our current government to ignore it too, because they know there's no votes in going after alt-right terrorism.
Open you're god damn eyes.
Also the EU anti-child-porn/terrorism squads are what's going (wrongly) after Project Gutenberg, you'll find no support for them from the left on this. The fact you need to imagine left wing support for nonsensical censorship should make you stop and ask yourself why you're having to reach to link violence to the left.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
From TFA:
CORRECTION: This post previously identified the sender of the 550 falsely identified URLs as Europolâ(TM)s EU Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU). The sender was in fact, the French national Internet Referral Unit, using Europolâ(TM)s application, which sends the email from an @europol.europa.eu address. The EU IRU has informed us that it is not involved in the national IRUsâ(TM) assessment criteria of terrorist content.
So it's actually just the French, not the EU.
I believe that the French are part of the EU. Or did they do a Frexit? They were following a tool that is part of the EU's tools for control of the Internet.
While you for some odd reason see this as some exoneration of the EU, I see it as just a sneak preview of how the EU's power that it has granted itself is very destructive. All it will take is for the various EU subunits to declare anything they don't like as terrorist, and demand that knowledge be eliminated.
Something tells me that there will be a lot of information stored away from the EU's gentle hands.
Forbidden knowledge and history you know.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Your examples of violence are exceedingly rare and sensationalized in our modern society. The fact is we have never seen such a peaceful and cohesive time within society before, and the trend continues in the right direction. There are those who seek to bring back fear and division and it looks like their campaign of propaganda has swept you up. I go out in the real world all the time, in all types of cities and rural settings, and see none of the things you describe.
I think it is you who needs to open your eyes, and if you think violence is something to be seriously worried about, you should probably get off the internet too.