It is nobody’s duty to expose anything for the sake of exposing it.

Bullshit. Exposure is the 1st step.

It is our duty to expose things for the sake of solving them.

Of course. But not necessarily directly. There are many ways to solve a problem. Spotlighting an embarrassment is a precursor. You can also travel to a call center and apply to work for them to improve their system. You do you.

If you have a better solution, we’re ready to hear it.

It’s not my problem to solve. Do you also demand that testers fix the bugs they report?

You’re perversely out of step with how volunteer effort is managed. Volunteers choose for themselves how much effort they contribute. You are not their manager. It’s not for you to drive-by task people and bark out orders. When a bug is reported, it’s public for anyone to solve, if they want. It’s a community. Not a corporation.

I don’t see anything being covered up.

You don’t know how threadcrap works. It’s designed to suppress the thesis by creating a distraction.

I’m confused what you think a better alternative would be? If there was a test number, what if that worked, but you couldn’t call the real 911?

A test number would suffice in some situations. When an incompetent VOIP provider takes an action to block calls “for security purposes”, they cannot legally block /all/ calls. 911 calls must be permitted. And 911 test calls would obviously require the same status. I do not trust their competency. But if their call blocking allows a 911 test number through, it proves that their blockade is not a simple crude block on /everything/.

A test number would not be the only solution. With some services you can set the CID to whatever you want. So in principle a CID of 555-1212 could have special meaning to 911 receiptionists. So a tester would set the CID info to that number before calling 911.

911 is not always instantly answered by humans. When answered by a machine, there could be a cancel code. E.g. dial “119” after connecting to cancel it.

There’s no way around it: to be absolutely sure your phone can contact 911, you have to… dial 911.

Sure, if you need that extra level of certainty. In the typical cases that I mentioned (no GSM subscription), a test number would be sufficient. It would show that the dialed number reaches a switch that treats it.

Removed by mod

and it will be fine.

Citation needed that there will be no fine to pay. Why not do a bit of research before making such claims? Quick search for false 911 call should flood your search results with fines, like $316 in Los Angeles.

South Carolina: misdemeanor. The penalties can include up to six months in jail, a fine of up to $200, or both.

It’s only an illegit 911 call if you call them for fun or if you test so often it can no longer be considered necessary.

Citation needed.

When attackers notice their victim making a distress call, they obviously convince them to back off and say the call was an accident. Emergency dispatchers will send help anyway to ensure coersion is not the case.

That’s a dicey hack. Maybe you could get away with it but you should know that there are typically fines for placing illegit 911 calls because they get enough false calls to have in place a system that automatically charges whatever the fine is. Was $50 for the 1st offense decades ago IIRC… likely higher now.

Gotta reference? Or can you elaborate? At the moment, I have a VOIP phone I need to test (as normal calls are blocked).

To be clear, it’s more about testing the phone network and services, not the hardware or software you use to dial numbers. I know my device on my side of the transaction functions fine.

First, it’s wrong to assume everyone has multiple phones. Those with multiple phones are also those who least need to test 911.

But if we can get past that, are you also assuming that the test phone has a phone number? Suppose you call the test center with a friend’s phone (always amusing when a policy imposes having friends, but anyway). The conversation would likely go like this:

me: I will make a test call from a different phone than the one I am calling from.
911 center: Okay, what is the phone number of the phone you are testing (so we know which inbound call to disregard)?
me: The test phone is not subscribed. There is no number.
911 center: Then we cannot do the test.

Or do you imagine the 911 center would say: just call us now and we will ignore whatever call we get?

Of course if a GSM phone has no chip, it also has no number assignment. If the test phone is a VOIP phone, the subscriber may not have a DID. There could be a phony internal number assignment in that case, but the customer does not necessarily know it.

The next problem is /which/ call center do you call when you are on a voip phone served in a different state than where the call is made from?

Website enshitified. Had to use lynx to see the text for more than 1 second:

$ torsocks lynx https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/08/password-manager-login-difficulty/688396/?gift=A_VYuI0Bs4X1cJsYonaJVE29HRH1L8Ei13mJ3d1owSA

Timing is important with clapping. No mention of what happened just before Lux clapped.

Enshitified website says: “Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker”

The NY Times used to have an onion that was not so restricted:

https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion/

But it’s down.

Would someone plz post the text of this article? Or an alternate source?

Depends on how you define the goal. It’s not going to work like magic, all in one motion. Indeed you are right that the DPAs are not going to take remedial action on the spot. The DPAs ignore most cases that get filed by individuals no matter how solid the law and evidence is.

After dealing with deadbeat DPAs, I’ve lowered my expectations quite a bit. The DPA cannot legally ignore the complain wholly. They must file it and acknowledge it. Then they will ignore it, sure. For me, it’s about getting the valid complaint on record. Then it gets reported in the stats and metrics in annual reports and the 4-year report that the EDPB prepares for the Commission. It helps add to the collossal embarrassment of DPA inaction.

A website isn’t a common carrier

We were talking about network neutrality, not just common carriers (which are only part of the netneutrality problem).

you cannot argue that a website isn’t allowed to control who they serve their content to.

Permission wasn’t the argument. When a website violates netneutrality principles, it’s not a problem of acting outside of authority. They are of course permitted to push access inequality assuming we are talking about the private sector where the contract permits it.

Cloudflare is a tool websites use to exercise that right,

One man’s freedom is another man’s oppression.

necessitated by the ever rising prevalence of bots and DDoS attacks.

It is /not/ necessary to use a tool as crude and reckless as Cloudflare to defend from attacks with disregard to collateral damage. There are many tools in the toolbox for that and CF is a poor choice favored by lazy admins.

Your proposed definition of net neutrality would destroy anyone’s ability to deal with these threats.

Only if you neglect to see admins who have found better ways to counter threats that do not make the security problem someone elses.

Can you at least provide examples of legitimate users who are hindered by the use of Cloudflare?

That was enumerated in a list in the linked article you replied to.

Interstate commerce is governed by the federal government.

Not exclusively. Interstate commerce implies that the feds can regulate it, not that they have exclusive power to do so. We see this with MJ laws. The fed believes it has the power to prohibit marijuana on the basis of interstate commerce, but in fact mj can be grown locally, sold locally, and consumed locally. Just like internet service can be.

Suppose you want to buy a stun gun in New York. You can find stun guns sold via mail order from another state (thus interstate commerce), but New York still managed to ban them despite the role of interstate commerce.

A close analog would be phone laws. The fed has the TCPA to protect you from telemarketers, but at the same time various states add additional legal protections for consumers w.r.t. telemarketing and those laws have force even if the caller is outside the country. (Collecting on the judgement is another matter).

Schools now require the internet for kids. ISPs being allowed to be anything more than a dumb pipe means they have the control of what information is sent across their network.

Education is specifically a duty of the state set out in the Constitution. If you can point to the statute requiring schools to provide internet for students, I believe it will be state law not federal law that you find.

The internet is now a basic human right in the United States for numerous reasons, one of which is #2.

I don’t quite follow. Are you saying that because education is a human right, that internet access is a human right? It doesn’t work that way. First of all, people who do not exercise their right to an education would not derive any rights implied by education. As for the students, if a state requires internet in education that does not mean that internet access becomes a human right. E.g. an Amish family might lawfully opt to homeschool their child, without internet. That would satisfy the right to education enshrined in the Unified Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) just fine. A student attending public school in a state that mandates internet in schools would merely have the incidental privilege of internet access, not an expanded human right that students in other states and countries do not have under the same human rights convocation. If your claim were true, it would mean that California (for example) requiring internet provisions for students would then mean students in Haiti (a country that also signed the UDHR that entitles people to a right to education) or Texas would gain a right to internet access via the state of California’s internal law. A state cannot amend the UDHR willy nilly like that.

Also, if internet could be construed as a human right by some mechanism that’s escaping me, the fed is not exclusively bound by human rights law. The fed signed the treaty, but all governments therein (state and local) are also bound to uphold human rights. Even private companies are bound to human rights law in the wording of the text, though expectation of enforcement gets shaky.

ISPs cross state boundaries and should be governed by interstate law.

I subscribed to internet service from a WISP at one point. A dude in my neighborhood rolled out his own ISP service. His market did not even exceed the city.

The local ISPs have ISPs themselves and as you climb the supply chain eventually you get into the internet backbone which would be interstate, but that’s not where the netneutrality problem manifests. The netneutrality problem is at the bottom of the supply chain in the last mile of cable where the end user meets their local ISP.

Also with MJ laws, several states have liberated the use of marijuana despite the feds using the interstate commerce act to ban it.

An ISP being a business, especially a publicly-traded one, will sacrifice all manner of consumer/user-protection in order to maximize profit. And having the states govern against that will lead to a smattering of laws where it becomes muddy on what can actually be enforced, and where.

Sure, and if the fed is relaxed because the telecoms feed the warchests of the POTUS and Congress, you have a nationwide shit-show. A progressive state can fix that by imposing netneutrality requirements. Just like many states introduce extra anti-telemarketing laws that give consumers protection above and beyond the TCPA.

And having the states govern against that will lead to a smattering of laws where it becomes muddy on what can actually be enforced, and where.

That’s a problem for the ISPs that benefits consumers. If ISPs operating in different states then have to adjust their framework for one state that mandates netneutrality, the cost of maintaining different frameworks in different states becomes a diminishing return. US consumers often benefit from EU law in this way. The EU forced PC makers to make disassembly fast and trivial, so harmful components could quickly and cheaply be removed before trashing obsolete hardware. The US did not impose this. Dell was disturbed because they had to make pro-environment adjustments as a condition to access to the EU market. They calculated that it would be more costly to sell two different versions, so the PCs they made for both the EU market and the US market become more eco-friendly. Thanks to the EU muddying the waters.

The right to repair will have the same consequences.

On a serious note, plenty of people here surely know what net neutrality is. Net neutrality is the guarantee that your ISP doesn’t (de-)prioritize traffic or outright block traffic, all packets are treated equally.

That’s true but it’s also the common (but overly shallow) take. It’s applicable here and good enough for the thread, but it’s worth noting that netneutrality is conceptually deeper than throttling and pricing games and beyond ISP shenanigans. The meaning was coined by Tim Wu, who spoke about access equality.

People fixate on performance which I find annoying in face of Cloudflare, who is not an ISP but who has done by far the most substantial damage to netneutrality worldwide by controlling who gets access to ~50%+ of world’s websites. The general public will never come to grasp Cloudflare’s oppression or the scale of it, much less relate it to netneutrality, for various reasons:

• Cloudflare is invisible to those allowed inside the walled garden, so its existence is mostly unknown
• The masses can only understand simple concepts about their speed being throttled. Understanding the nuts and bolts of discrimination based on IP address reputation is lost on most.
• The US gov is obviously pleased that half the world’s padlocked web traffic is trivially within their unwarranted surveillance view via just one corporation in California. They don’t want people to realize the harm CF does to netneutrality and pressure lawmakers to draft netneutrality policy in a way that’s not narrowly ISP-focused.

Which means netneutrality policy is doomed to ignore Cloudflare and focus on ISPs.

Most people at least have some control over which ISP they select. Competition is paltry, but we all have zero control over whether a website they want to use is in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden.

Why would it necessarily have to be federal law, and not state law?

/cc @ulkesh@beehaw.org

Whether the legislation is appropriate at the state or fed domain is unclear. Certainly if the orange tyrant takes power again, I would probably want state govs to be able to protect consumers from netneutrality abuses.

It’s worth noting that the FCC’s so-called “Open” Internet Advisory Committee (#OIAC) tragically gives two seats on the board to:

• Cloudflare
• Comcast

Both of whom are abusers of #netneutrality, especially Cloudflare. A well-informed Trump-free administration should be showing Cloudflare and Comcast the door ASAP.

Sure, Trump would just bring them back. But it’d at least be a good symbolic move.

Indeed, as someone else pointed out, the needed change should come from pro-netneutrality legislation. And the legislation needs to be broad enough to block Cloudflare’s broad discriminatory arbitrary attack on access equality, not just tinker with speeds at the ISP consumer level.

Hence why we need a public option.

from the article:

Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display Your non-personal data for its business purposes.

Holy shit. I wonder if HP is feeding customers’ data to an #AI machine to exploit in some way. It doesn’t even seem to be limited to what people print. HP’s software package is probably not just a printer driver. But even if it is, a driver runs in the kernel space, so IIUC there’s no limit to what data it can mine.

Glad to see mention of Oki! Oki is the single most ethical choice. But they pulled out of the US market, sadly enough. The US is no place for ethical products.