It sets an absolutely obscene precedent that a government can globally restrict information. Even global terrible actors like Russia and China haven’t succeeded at that.

Yes, that precedent is 1000 orders of magnitude more harm than India losing access (which they won’t, because the entirety of Wikipedia is open source and would be mirrored in the country instantly. But even if they actually would, it is literally impossible to get anywhere near the harm of the precedent this sets).

Being available elsewhere is entirely irrelevant. Wikipedia must stand against totalitarian censorship to resemble a reputable organization.

Complying is unforgivable.

They not only can, trivially. They unconditionally must.

It is not possible to ever be a reputable organization ever again if you have to choose between censoring content globally for an authoritarian government and shutting down in that country, and censoring content globally is something they genuinely consider. Open, fact based information is their entire reason for existing.

No, I have no interest in digging through their history. But it’s less than trivial to do. Any random no name site can do it in 5 minutes with any source of the geo-mapping information, with virtually no knowledge required. It is not work.

GDPR can do literally nothing but block any site that doesn’t have finances under their jurisdiction, and they shouldn’t be able to. No one else will enforce their fines for them. It’s no different than Russia fining Google more money than exists. You can’t just magically rob someone because you’re a country.

Yes, they do. They’ve done it in the past.

It literally doesn’t matter what Indian courts rule. Being banned from India is orders and orders of magnitude more acceptable than blocking a single article anywhere else on the planet. It single handedly eliminates all of their credibility.

India isn’t capable of enforcing fines against an organization that doesn’t operate in their country and there’s no chance a US court will enforce such an unhinged judgement. They can’t be forced to pay.

They already have the capability to block content locally.

There isn’t a worse option than allowing a government to globally block an article.

You can’t give a deranged dictatorship global censorship authority.

That keeps the entire planet from access to information.

Everywhere else on the planet, in order for a device to be cleared for sale, that specific model undergoes heavy testing for regulatory compliance by a government agency.

“The specs said it was fine” is literally never going to be a valid legal defense, and making that argument will get you laughed out of court. Either it’s actually certified to be used as you’re allowing it to be used, or you get the hammer dropped on you, as you should.

The carrier doesn’t decide that.

I literally quoted the part that required carriers to block ineligible phones.

They should have just blocked India.

Censoring factual articles globally is an extremely bad precedent to set for yourself.

Already made a post on here but I went down a Brandon Sanderson rabbit hole. Still working through the Stormlight novellas, but my library has his secret projects on audiobook and they’re fucking spectacular. (Read Tress and Yumi so far.)

The premium hardcovers look gorgeous, too, but I haven’t convinced myself to pay $55 apiece for them, even though I really want to. (The regular hardcover of Tress isn’t bad, but the Yumi one is really disappointing.)

The outcome of your actions isn’t in a theoretical world.

You absolutely would be behaving unethically In that scenario, because you took an action that you knew, with absolute certainty, could only result in either no impact at all, or in making a monster president. There is no theoretical outcome where your action is capable of doing good, and there is a potential outcome where your action does extreme harm.

I’ve started the habit of using spoiler tags to collapse tangents when I go overboard at times. It makes it easier for me to scroll past, so I’d assume it’s also easier for people who aren’t actively engaging with my posts to deal with.

I did read the article. Checking is not and should not be their responsibility.

The only legitimate way to check is to do actual, intensive, independent testing of every device in question, specific to your country’s regulations. Spec sheets are not a valid approach to verifying that a device will work.

Regulatory compliance of hardware is not, and should not be, the responsibility of the service provider. It’s the responsibility of the manufacturer to have their hardware certified basically everywhere.

Frankly, the rules shouldn’t even allow providers to make that determination. They should either be certified to meet the requirements by an independent agency, or have providers be prohibited from allowing them.

Just days ahead of the shutdown, Australia’s media regulator ACMA finalised a new “direction” (basically a rule) that meant telecom companies had to refuse service to all phones that relied on 3G for making emergency calls.

The idea was to prevent people from mistakenly believing that phones were fully working, only to realise they were unable to make emergency calls when the crucial moment came.

Australians with older 4G phones may also be caught out because of the way the phones are configured.

It is up to the telcos to work out which phones are affected, notify the owners, block their phones, and help make other arrangements such as low- or no-cost replacement phones.

However, as Telstra and Optus noted during a Senate inquiry into the shutdown, telecom companies are unable to tell which individual devices suffer from this problem unless have they sold them.

I’m not saying it’s not partly on the providers, but validating that a bunch of obscure phones that aren’t sold in your country meet new regulatory requirements is not as easy as you’re making it out to be.

The crazy part is the “stripped down” was still relatively modest. She was in underwear and bra, but they covered a hell of a lot more than most people wear to the beach in a lot of the world.

Human eyes are far better than cameras at real time adaptation to varied lighting conditions though.

I get bodily autonomy and why it should be a firm line you don’t cross (despite the same people thinking you should spend eternity in prison if you don’t want to be an incubator for 9 months or smoke a plant), but I really wish we could charge all the people that deliberately infected people with Covid by going in public without getting a simple safe shot with manslaughter.

That’s fine, and in principle I understand the threat, but I think there are plenty of security experts who choose to just use cloudflare because some of the services they provide genuinely require their scale and they have a pretty steady history of making very measured decisions about where they need to leverage their position to improve security.

There’s never been any indication that they’re collecting more than they need to or exploiting it beyond the scope of the service they provide, and several scenarios where they have refused to cooperate with governments trying to do invasive things. I absolutely think “moderately secure” still applies to traffic routed through cloudflare.