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[Amunak <amunak AT amunak.net>]

On 28.06.2019 4:05, Daniel Quintiliani wrote:

To me it's part of a greater problem - censorship from companies, especially in the tech industry, who are more concerned with morality than delivering a packet to its destination and a profit to their shareholders, in this case the morality of malware, ransom, and spam rather than the morality of political causes, politicians, and conspiracy theories.

The thing is that most enthusiasts like us generally don't think about people abusing software and networks. We want great, interesting features for everybody, because we have fun providing them and such. And then some asshat comes around, makes malware that uses your services or they use them to spread CP and whatnot... And we don't know how to deal with it. Especially when on one hand we ant a "libre" and "uncensored" network, but at the same time we live in a society where some things just are unacceptable (and sometimes for good reason), and we have a hard time dealing with it.

Thankfully most of us don't actually encounter and need to fix those issues.

Don't know if anyone missed this question, I asked during the vote, and nobody answered me, the concerns with child pornography and malware that were brought up, aren't we protected by safe harbor laws like CDA 230 and the DMCA, and the equivalent of those in the EU and elsewhere?

Technically we are probably protected under the DMCA. But that is only a defense when someone actually sues you, and it definitely doesn't protect you against private/proprietary de facto standards like Spamhaus' blacklist and such. Sure, you may be protected and when someone sues you you may be able to argue that you aren't actually spreading child porn or malware, but at that point you're already fucked: you are being sued for spreading CP/malware/whatever, and your domains/addresses/services are already blacklisted by all major providers.

And it's also important to realize that laws differ wildly across the world. DMCA is a US thing, and other countries may have similar provisions, but there are certainly other countries where you would be held liable (maybe China or something). And do you want to be sued/blacklisted/seeked by Chinese government? Or some African government for hosting LGBT sites or something?

Again, realistically nothing will happen to you, me or OpenNic. But we're tiny and uninteresting. And it's perhaps better to self-censor at least those most egregious cases so that you can easily defend the other ones.