I find it far more ironic that they are called Reclaim the Internet.
I am dating myself, but I remember the Internet. It’s rather ironic too that the actual Internet, literal and figuratively free internet, was always doomed from the start, just like AI is effectively doomed in terms of it being some kind of productivity tool or amazing thing you can use to build your own thing, because the logical conclusion is very bad for most people, including the technorati types here that think themselves above it and immune.
If you’re shocked and surprised by the way there Internet was maneuvered into the surveillance prison Flock made itself the poster child of at the hands of Mr Langley, take that trajectory and lay it over AI, but only at exponential rates. You don’t have to believe me, it won’t matter either way, it’s happening, short of the Soviet style implosion of the “American” empire.
Maybe once the planet has been made uninhabitable to biological life there will be an AI robot cybernetic splinter group trying to “reclaim humanity”.
You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model. So I don't think AI will lead to more centralization. Besides local models, the interface itself - prompt based steering - is eminently more open ended that apps or websites ever were. Cloud or local, you get more control now as a user.
But you cannot train an open weight model by yourself, and maybe there could some distributed training net ran by thousand of volunteers around the world in the future, but until we get there we will still be tied to BigCo (American, Chinese or wherever in the world) decisions.
You would need institutions to do this? What do we have besides global megacorps with the resources for this? Universities perhaps training models for their local catchment?
This is exactly why I believe LLMs are fundamentally divergent from the trajectory of internet service path we have been on. It allows us to create space and disconnection from an otherwise tethered experience.
It is possible that models are only the byproduct of what frontier labs are doing. In other words, what you call AI is just a log, a trace of what the real AI, for which only frontier labs have access to, did.
> You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model.
You can very much host websites on your machine (not the whole internet, but then again you can’t host the most powerful models either) and you can very much download a Wikipedia or Internet Archive.
But most people never will. This idea that everyone will soon be using local models while frolicking happily in the fields is a pipe dream. Besides, local or not, these models can already be harmful in ways the internet took decades to approach.
A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
How would a soviet style implosion of the US work in real life? A civil war is far more likely and we already have historical precedence for that.
And your AI robot cybernetic splinter group thing sounds a lot like the biblical story of Noah than anything that's based on science or you know facts.
The US and particularly its armed forces don’t look at all like the 1800s, so another civil war of that nature is not possible. Sabotage, terrorism and political violence could be a new form of civil unrest, but full out civil war without a divided military with entire divisions defecting, is very unlikely.
Yes, we are unlikely to get to a point of an 1800s civil war, of course. But I mean, if things do get that bad, we cannot rule out a divided military as well. How that would work in practice, I'm not sure, since, as you mentioned, armed forces work these days differently as well, and defection like that might not even be feasible, I guess.
Overall I would say civil war is more likely (even given how unlikely it is) than just a robotic uprising that will root out all humanity and make the world unfit for biological beings as the original comment implied.
Nuclear war is a civilization-ending tool that AI could realistically exploit. It would only need to hack a weaker nuclear nation to send a ICBM our way, sabotage communications and let our draconian nuclear war strategy do the rest. There’s a book by Annie Jacobsen that explains from a plausible military perspective how this could rapidly unfold. It was poorly plagiarized by Netflix and turned into a mini series but the book is much more better at scaring the s out of you.
Let me add a few more layers just for some fun and profit :-D
Here[0] is an archive.org page which archives an archive.is page which archives the original article about internet censorship of an archive site that might require an archive of an archive site to read (given that people of spain cant now view archive.is in the first place or might have some difficulties doing so)
I live in Spain and can still enjoy access to this site. This is enforced by major ISPs (Vodafone among others), so anyone sane just opts for a local ISP (if they have a choice)
Works fine for me, also Spain, Vodafone as the ISP.
Edit: eeh, that's a different site than the one mentioned by the submission, why it wouldn't work?
Edit2: Also, the error is wrong and server-side. If your ISP is trying to block the website, you'll get either a tls error that the certificate isn't matching, or for non-https sites you get redirected to the scary "You're contributing to something illegal blah blah".
Personally, I welcome this. Archive.today has been blocking my country from using the site for years and for no good reason. Maybe if enough countries block the site, someone more reasonable will build an alternative.
Fun fact I learned in Spain recently. They block Cloudflare Edge IPs during soccer games. Took me a long time to figure out why I was having intermittent outages.
Apparently all of south western europe blocks half the internet in the name of football. Besides Spain there's also Italy, France, Portugal and surprisingly the UK somewhat.
Access to information feels to me like a human right. Blocking that by any means (legal blockade, price unrealistic high) feels like an infringement on a Human Right.
I know this isn’t the way the world works yet, but a Human can dream.
Idealistically, I agree with access to information. But how do you square that (and I don’t have a solution) with the proliferation of misinformation used to manipulate the population or the access to dangerous information such as building bombs and bio weapons?
That knowledge is already available and generally people don’t build bombs or bioweapons. Otherwise they could still go to university and learn all that if they so wish
It is available, and searching for it is a good way to end up on a list. I also couldn’t help but notice you completely glossed over the much more important point of misinformation for manipulation.
I understand it to be a stand off between western special services on behalf of the media empires, and some random russian… criminals? their own intelligence or adjacent criminals? Just randos on a mission?
This censorship mechanism comes from 2011, when it was created under the Spanish Socialist Party's government lead by Zapatero. There was a lot of backlash, but the Intellectual Property Comission (also known as "Comisión Sinde") was never dissolved under the next governments' rules.
Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar. Movistar used one of the subsidiaries to denounce themselves and other IPs so they would reach a friendly agreement (again, with themselves) that the judge considered enough to enforce the current Cloudflare blocks.
And just to add some more context, the Second Section (Sección Segunda), which is part of the executive branch, was created because time after time judges concluded that downloading movies from the internet was perfectly legal[1]. So the PSOE's gov at the time (with Zapatero being president) created a law that just sidesteps judges altogether, and bans access from the executive branch.
> Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar
It is maybe worth looking at the overlap between La Liga / Movistar directors, and former government officials. The Venn diagram has more overlap that one would like to see
It started around 2008 when they had one of the most permissive landscapes in Europe with pressure by the US using the Special 301 whatchlist. Then Obama increased the pressure with Zapatero and after a couple of tries the timeline you describe was set in motion.
Spain did not got hit by WW2 cause it was absolutely destroyed by a civil war beginning 1936. After that a dictatorship of 40 years and when it opened all industry got hit cause it was heavily protected and could not compete in open markets, add to that most of the working industries were cheaply sold to friends of the dictatorship who were, and some of them still are, in power positions.
> a distant sixth in economic size behind even Russia.
By what metric? Because Spain is sixth also by population, and I have the feeling you are using total GDP as scale. Using that, China is the richest economy, and India is the third richest country in the world. Meanwhile Switzerland and Singapore (really rich in reallity) are below 30th, and below Nigeria or Pakistan.
By per capita GDP we Spain are not even 6th, because Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Monaco, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland... are above us and also above Germany, UK or France.
You mean Spain the fastest growing European country by many metrics? Not sure, we're here, been chilling all summer, time to get back to work now :) What happened to the country you live in?
Spain’s youth unemployment is the highest in Europe. I hope it’s improving, but economically Spain has not recovered post-2008 in line with others in the EU.
> fastest growing European country by many metrics
Countries grow in secondary matters and the primary ones (civilization) remain unattended.
And by the way, when something "grows fast", do not misunderstand the indicator... Ethiopia had a 13% annual growth recently; Guyana has a 16% annual growth at this time: you are not thinking that "life is good there" and "Miami videoclip vibes everywhere", right?
According to GDP per capita, Spain is below Italy, but above Portugal. Has its position changed much over the last century? I would be interested to see a measure of that, but how far back is it feasible to estimate GDP per capita?
I don't know how Spain was affected by WW2, but they had a very nasty civil war just before WW2. I'm not sure if that's relevant to GDP per capita, though, because a war can sometimes improve the economy by leading to the overflow of a system in which progress is blocked by a relatively rich ruling class.
I was been there. I mean socialist fantasy and everyone was equally poor except party members. It is astonishing to watch this shit happening in different countries with different cultures during long period of time. But with same end. And it is not prosperity. This time in Berlin as recent example: https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-election-housing-cris...
Since a few months archive.is is "unstable" from Spain. I thought the reason is the ISP but sometimes by just reloading it works...
Can anybody shed some light?
Since a few months archive.is is unstable regardless of where I connect from, Spain or not. Are others not seeing the same thing? Maybe 20% of the times I try to use it the servers aren't responding.
"Note: archive.org, or web.archive.org, run by the Internet Archive and the most-used web archive on Wikipedia, is uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today. Please keep using archive.org"
https://archive.is/2YdN9
This is so funny.
An article about internet censorship of an archive site that requires an archive site to read!
That’s Brilliant! :D
I find it far more ironic that they are called Reclaim the Internet.
I am dating myself, but I remember the Internet. It’s rather ironic too that the actual Internet, literal and figuratively free internet, was always doomed from the start, just like AI is effectively doomed in terms of it being some kind of productivity tool or amazing thing you can use to build your own thing, because the logical conclusion is very bad for most people, including the technorati types here that think themselves above it and immune.
If you’re shocked and surprised by the way there Internet was maneuvered into the surveillance prison Flock made itself the poster child of at the hands of Mr Langley, take that trajectory and lay it over AI, but only at exponential rates. You don’t have to believe me, it won’t matter either way, it’s happening, short of the Soviet style implosion of the “American” empire.
Maybe once the planet has been made uninhabitable to biological life there will be an AI robot cybernetic splinter group trying to “reclaim humanity”.
In a zoo humanity lays protected. These beings used to roam earth as the apex predators and destroyers of their ecosystem and their species too.
You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model. So I don't think AI will lead to more centralization. Besides local models, the interface itself - prompt based steering - is eminently more open ended that apps or websites ever were. Cloud or local, you get more control now as a user.
But you cannot train an open weight model by yourself, and maybe there could some distributed training net ran by thousand of volunteers around the world in the future, but until we get there we will still be tied to BigCo (American, Chinese or wherever in the world) decisions.
You would need institutions to do this? What do we have besides global megacorps with the resources for this? Universities perhaps training models for their local catchment?
This is exactly why I believe LLMs are fundamentally divergent from the trajectory of internet service path we have been on. It allows us to create space and disconnection from an otherwise tethered experience.
It is possible that models are only the byproduct of what frontier labs are doing. In other words, what you call AI is just a log, a trace of what the real AI, for which only frontier labs have access to, did.
> You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model.
You can very much host websites on your machine (not the whole internet, but then again you can’t host the most powerful models either) and you can very much download a Wikipedia or Internet Archive.
But most people never will. This idea that everyone will soon be using local models while frolicking happily in the fields is a pipe dream. Besides, local or not, these models can already be harmful in ways the internet took decades to approach.
A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
It’s already fairly realistic to get 2022 era frontier models running on prosumer hardware, which is pretty good for freedom.
How would a soviet style implosion of the US work in real life? A civil war is far more likely and we already have historical precedence for that.
And your AI robot cybernetic splinter group thing sounds a lot like the biblical story of Noah than anything that's based on science or you know facts.
The US and particularly its armed forces don’t look at all like the 1800s, so another civil war of that nature is not possible. Sabotage, terrorism and political violence could be a new form of civil unrest, but full out civil war without a divided military with entire divisions defecting, is very unlikely.
Yes, we are unlikely to get to a point of an 1800s civil war, of course. But I mean, if things do get that bad, we cannot rule out a divided military as well. How that would work in practice, I'm not sure, since, as you mentioned, armed forces work these days differently as well, and defection like that might not even be feasible, I guess.
Overall I would say civil war is more likely (even given how unlikely it is) than just a robotic uprising that will root out all humanity and make the world unfit for biological beings as the original comment implied.
Nuclear war is a civilization-ending tool that AI could realistically exploit. It would only need to hack a weaker nuclear nation to send a ICBM our way, sabotage communications and let our draconian nuclear war strategy do the rest. There’s a book by Annie Jacobsen that explains from a plausible military perspective how this could rapidly unfold. It was poorly plagiarized by Netflix and turned into a mini series but the book is much more better at scaring the s out of you.
To your point: it takes 1-3% of a population to upend things…based on historical reference.
Chaotic coincidences,
because the empire is too large to control all of its interests.
Could have been avoided - too much money to be made in the various stages of it not being avoided.
Let me add a few more layers just for some fun and profit :-D
Here[0] is an archive.org page which archives an archive.is page which archives the original article about internet censorship of an archive site that might require an archive of an archive site to read (given that people of spain cant now view archive.is in the first place or might have some difficulties doing so)
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260920074416/https://serjaimel...
(If someone is perhaps interested and wants to see me talk more about what this is, then please read the blogpost that I had made for more info: https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/htmlpipe-and-how-we-ca...)
I live in Spain and can still enjoy access to this site. This is enforced by major ISPs (Vodafone among others), so anyone sane just opts for a local ISP (if they have a choice)
It also doesn't seem to be enforced on my Movistar connection, which means the single biggest ISP is opting out?
How is it enforced? IP or DNS?
According to this site https://bandaancha.eu/articulos/gobierno-tiene-lista-web-ofi..., they use SNI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication)
Enabling ESNI in Firefox should be a countermeasure (disables SNI extension of the TLS so that hostname is no longer sent in plain text)
https://superuser.com/questions/1346634/modern-browser-with-...
This is working fine for me in spain so far....
”archive dot is” is a part of the same DDoS network of sites. Don’t use them!
Feel free to link the whole article through a different site
https://unwall.app/reclaimthenet.org/spain-blocks-archive-to...
https://web.archive.org/web/20260920061809/https://reclaimth...
Vs
https://archive.is/2YdN9
One has paywall, one doesn't...
Sorry man, people will keep DDoSing some random guy's blog. It's a service problem lol
"502 Bad Gateway" (I'm in Spain)
> "502 Bad Gateway" (I'm in Spain)
Here you go, this should work: https://web.archive.org/web/20260920074416/https://serjaimel...
(an archive.org page which archives an archive.is page, might take some time to load though)
(this uses htmlpipe, something I have made :-D)
Works fine for me, also Spain, Vodafone as the ISP.
Edit: eeh, that's a different site than the one mentioned by the submission, why it wouldn't work?
Edit2: Also, the error is wrong and server-side. If your ISP is trying to block the website, you'll get either a tls error that the certificate isn't matching, or for non-https sites you get redirected to the scary "You're contributing to something illegal blah blah".
There’s a whole network of “archive.<something>” sites under the “archive.today” umbrella. I’ve seen .is .ps .md .ph and .at, at least.
Personally, I welcome this. Archive.today has been blocking my country from using the site for years and for no good reason. Maybe if enough countries block the site, someone more reasonable will build an alternative.
Fun fact I learned in Spain recently. They block Cloudflare Edge IPs during soccer games. Took me a long time to figure out why I was having intermittent outages.
Apparently all of south western europe blocks half the internet in the name of football. Besides Spain there's also Italy, France, Portugal and surprisingly the UK somewhat.
Access to information feels to me like a human right. Blocking that by any means (legal blockade, price unrealistic high) feels like an infringement on a Human Right.
I know this isn’t the way the world works yet, but a Human can dream.
Idealistically, I agree with access to information. But how do you square that (and I don’t have a solution) with the proliferation of misinformation used to manipulate the population or the access to dangerous information such as building bombs and bio weapons?
That knowledge is already available and generally people don’t build bombs or bioweapons. Otherwise they could still go to university and learn all that if they so wish
It is available, and searching for it is a good way to end up on a list. I also couldn’t help but notice you completely glossed over the much more important point of misinformation for manipulation.
[delayed]
This is a welcome development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
That's not a reason to censor it at the state level.
I understand it to be a stand off between western special services on behalf of the media empires, and some random russian… criminals? their own intelligence or adjacent criminals? Just randos on a mission?
Modern Spain is having patchy record with digital age. Earlier:
1. Blocked Telegram with a court order, reinstituted after public backslash
2. Blocks Internet and Cloudflare during La Liga matches
3. Prime minister Pedro Sanchez from Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) has demanded the end of anonymity in Internet
They say it is to protect the kids, but likely it is to find out who watches La Liga without a premium subscription.
This censorship mechanism comes from 2011, when it was created under the Spanish Socialist Party's government lead by Zapatero. There was a lot of backlash, but the Intellectual Property Comission (also known as "Comisión Sinde") was never dissolved under the next governments' rules.
Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar. Movistar used one of the subsidiaries to denounce themselves and other IPs so they would reach a friendly agreement (again, with themselves) that the judge considered enough to enforce the current Cloudflare blocks.
And just to add some more context, the Second Section (Sección Segunda), which is part of the executive branch, was created because time after time judges concluded that downloading movies from the internet was perfectly legal[1]. So the PSOE's gov at the time (with Zapatero being president) created a law that just sidesteps judges altogether, and bans access from the executive branch.
[1] See also: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho_de_copia_privada
> Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar
It is maybe worth looking at the overlap between La Liga / Movistar directors, and former government officials. The Venn diagram has more overlap that one would like to see
Right. First case was performed by the executive branch of the State. Second one by the justice branch.
It started around 2008 when they had one of the most permissive landscapes in Europe with pressure by the US using the Special 301 whatchlist. Then Obama increased the pressure with Zapatero and after a couple of tries the timeline you describe was set in motion.
Thanks MPAA and RIAA as usual.
The attempts to end anonimity and to end cash flow are ideological and pretty surely did not come from the USA.
What happened to Spain? They didn’t get hit by WW2 and yet…are a distant sixth in economic size behind even Russia.
Spain did not got hit by WW2 cause it was absolutely destroyed by a civil war beginning 1936. After that a dictatorship of 40 years and when it opened all industry got hit cause it was heavily protected and could not compete in open markets, add to that most of the working industries were cheaply sold to friends of the dictatorship who were, and some of them still are, in power positions.
Is being 9th in (nominal) GDP rating now is mentioned as "even"? 90% of the world is behind Russia.
> a distant sixth in economic size behind even Russia.
By what metric? Because Spain is sixth also by population, and I have the feeling you are using total GDP as scale. Using that, China is the richest economy, and India is the third richest country in the world. Meanwhile Switzerland and Singapore (really rich in reallity) are below 30th, and below Nigeria or Pakistan.
By per capita GDP we Spain are not even 6th, because Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Monaco, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland... are above us and also above Germany, UK or France.
You mean Spain the fastest growing European country by many metrics? Not sure, we're here, been chilling all summer, time to get back to work now :) What happened to the country you live in?
Spain’s youth unemployment is the highest in Europe. I hope it’s improving, but economically Spain has not recovered post-2008 in line with others in the EU.
Don't worry. Finland has taken over with the highest unemployment and will likely soon have the highest youth unemployment.
> fastest growing European country by many metrics
Countries grow in secondary matters and the primary ones (civilization) remain unattended.
And by the way, when something "grows fast", do not misunderstand the indicator... Ethiopia had a 13% annual growth recently; Guyana has a 16% annual growth at this time: you are not thinking that "life is good there" and "Miami videoclip vibes everywhere", right?
According to GDP per capita, Spain is below Italy, but above Portugal. Has its position changed much over the last century? I would be interested to see a measure of that, but how far back is it feasible to estimate GDP per capita?
I don't know how Spain was affected by WW2, but they had a very nasty civil war just before WW2. I'm not sure if that's relevant to GDP per capita, though, because a war can sometimes improve the economy by leading to the overflow of a system in which progress is blocked by a relatively rich ruling class.
My grandparents would routinely call the 40s "The years of hunger" so you can guess which way it went.
PSOE happened
Since the end of the Civil War in 1939, Spain has spent roughly 65% of the time under Right/Far-Right rule and 35% under Left/Center-Left rule.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
But then again, discussing politics hardly ever gets less divisive here or elsewhere.
The fault in that comment is to be unsupported by arguments.
Otherwise, there would be no divisiveness in fairly assessing measures in Economics.
I was been there. I mean socialist fantasy and everyone was equally poor except party members. It is astonishing to watch this shit happening in different countries with different cultures during long period of time. But with same end. And it is not prosperity. This time in Berlin as recent example: https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-election-housing-cris...
Why are the protesters in Berlin holding signs in English?
Because they want to have the eyes of global press on Germany
Does archive.is have problems? I tried this article with it and it didn't work:
https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurship/burned-out-and...
Error: Invalid InterceptionId.
Since a few months archive.is is "unstable" from Spain. I thought the reason is the ISP but sometimes by just reloading it works... Can anybody shed some light?
Since a few months archive.is is unstable regardless of where I connect from, Spain or not. Are others not seeing the same thing? Maybe 20% of the times I try to use it the servers aren't responding.
Avoid those archive sites like the plague. They are not trustworthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
At the bottom of that page FYI -
"Note: archive.org, or web.archive.org, run by the Internet Archive and the most-used web archive on Wikipedia, is uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today. Please keep using archive.org"
They are the only reliable way for me to read proper news in Economist / FT / WSJ / WashingtonPost etc...
Well except paying $300 a month I guess.
Did they find a La Liga game on it or something?
I'd built something which can allow people to archive archive.is pages on archive.org.
https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/htmlpipe-and-how-we-ca...
This could perhaps be used for this purpose.
I have submitted it on hackernews once again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49773417
(Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47574562)
Are they not communists like most of HN?