Thank you, Jacques. Nobody else was thinking that. Very insightful. Much better that we talk about Wikileaks... again... than discuss a programmable dynamic DNS service run by one of the largest tech companies on the Internet.
I think Amazon trying to sell a mission critical service like DNS right after rolling over at the first prod from some politician (and a pretty lousy one at that) serves as a good reminder that if you want to use services from them you'd better make sure that you are not going to do anything at all that challenges the powers that be or you'll be out faster than a warrant can be served.
Service providers of all sorts should stand by their customers until a court order to the contrary is served, especially when institutions like the EFF are solidly on the side of those customers.
Amazon trying to sell a mission critical service like DNS right after rolling over at the first prod from some politician
I think it's pretty clear that Amazon didn't roll over because of Lieberman's remarks. Rather, Amazon did what they did because they thought it was the right to do: "it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy".
I understand you're passionate about this, but let's not conflate what actually happened.
Joe Lieberman called Amazon and said [something] to them.
Late that evening, Wikileaks was cut off.
The next day, Lieberman put out a press release: "This morning Amazon informed my staff that it has ceased to host the Wikileaks website. I wish that Amazon had taken this action earlier based on Wikileaks’ previous publication of classified material. The company’s decision to cut off Wikileaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies Wikileaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material. I call on any other company or organization that is hosting Wikileaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them."
Lieberman's spokesperson added: "Senator Lieberman hopes that what has transpired with Amazon will send a message to other companies."
The next day, Lieberman introduced a bill in Congress that would make it a Federal crime to do what Amazon was doing, hosting the Wikileaks material.
You could characterize that as "pretty clear that Amazon didn't roll over because of Lieberman", but that characterization would be utterly mendacious.
They actually were pretty careful about that from what I gather, with the 5 news agencies they worked with telling them how to redact them and what to release:
You're attempting to make the argument that newspapers (most of which are not even American) can make accurate judgements about the effects of releasing US intelligence. That's a poor argument. What is it about news agencies that qualifies them to make such judgments? Compare this to the Pentagon Papers where someone with intimate knowledge of the situation decided what to leak.
Regardless, that doesn't change the fact that your original claim that Amazon rolled over because of Lieberman is false and unsubstantiated.
Where did the US gain the moral ground here, such that only US papers would be best judges? Almost everything the US does has large effects in the rest of the world. I think it's a very good thing that US media isn't in control of the story.
Did you even bother to read the post I wrote? The thrust of the argument is that no paper is the best judge. In fact, newspapers are categorically unqualified to make judgments in this case.
If that's the best "proof" you have, it's not even worth discussing. Amazon explicitly denied that they booted Wikileaks because of Lieberman. Lieberman isn't even saying that either. He's claiming that his staffers, were informed by Amazon, which probably is an exaggeration.
Sorry, but until you show me more proof than the verbal statements of one of the most corrupt US Senators, I'm not convinced it actually even happened.
If the conversation was about anything else, using only the word of Joe Lieberman as proof would be a joke. I'm honestly shocked that you think my standards are exacting.
This is why Wikileaks is needed. You're so brainwashed by the current political system you're willing to take a politician's words at face value. The only way we'd know what actually happened is if someone leaked Lieberman's communications with Amazon, and Amazon's internal communications about the issue.
>ISP that is also a jury to content that is not a clear case is evil.
User: Amazon, I found child pornography on one of your hosted pages.
Amazon: Sorry we're not legal experts we'll keep the content until a court case delivers a verdict.
Yeah, right.
You're living in cloud cuckoo land if you believe that an ISP has to forgo all moral judgement on content and only remove or deny hosting if something is proven to be illegal.
Repost #3 (I should make this into a macro or something): This is a threaded comment system. We can have as many discussions about something (post or other comment) as we want: go off on wild tangents, point out the spelling, have a pun thread, mention patterns of blogging/commenting the parent fits into, reply to the author on a separate subject, share anecdotes related to the subject of the post, and actually talk about the content of a post or comment, all at the same time, without breaking anything. That's what's so neat about threaded discussion: it doesn't require the "comparative notability" that a linear conversation needs in order to function.
jacquesm's comment (and this thread descending from it) does not in any way take away from our ability to talk about Route 53 as a technology.
Don't repost that comment again; it's wrong. 67 of 127 comments on this thread are about Wikileaks; just as importantly, the first 40% of the thread is dedicated to a pointless political argument ("Did Joe Lieberman shut down Wikileaks? Did you know government documents can't be copyrighted?") that have nothing to do with the story.
"The first 40% of the thread" is not dedicated to Wikileaks; one comment branch is. This page is a tree, not a list, and should be treated as such. It currently has 27 children, 3 of which mention Wikileaks.
That you have to scroll past the entirety of those 3 children's discussion to get to what interests you is an incident of the way the comment tree is rendered by default. If tangential threads started collapsed and had to be expanded (assuming there's come clever way to detect tangential threads, or just people such as yourself to tag them), your complaint would vanish, with no change to the ratio of Wikileaks posts:"on-topic" posts.
And just as, well, a tangential argument: if someone is planning to avoid using all AWS products, they will avoid using this one as well, thus making such avoidance relevant to the story. What you're reacting to is the fact that the topic has already been beaten to death in other HN threads, not that it's particularly irrelevant to this one. For a while now, I've been thinking that we need some form of super-threading (such that article posts which form a sequence will have a single, merged comment thread), but now I'm starting to think we need aspect-oriented threading as well—such that this sub-thread, with its connection between this article and Wikileaks, would actually appear in the comments of both super-threads, and if you had hit "ignore" on the Wikileaks thread, the comments in here that also apply to it would disappear. Sound workable?
I don't disagree with anything you have to say here. The problem is, you're talking about how things would work on a site that isn't Hacker News, and I'm talking about how things are not working on a site that is.
I think it's fair to say, even from the perspective of an impartial observer (I'm not one), that Wikileaks ran this whole comment thread off the rails. This is a discussion about what will probably be the biggest news about DNS over the next 2 quarters, and DNS has --- literally --- taken a back seat to someone trying to explain to Jacques what Joe Lieberman represents in US politics.
The arguments in favor of injecting WL into these discussions strike me as very similar to the arguments Ron Paul advocates used to inject Paul into discussions in early 2008.
True, I don't think it's working as-is. I'm picturing HN the way it could be, and it's clouding my judgement of its current UX (I picture "jumping down to the next sibling node to this node" as a single atomic action, so my brain doesn't record the time I spend doing it.) And, since people had to scroll so far to get to something relevant, they were more likely to give up and comment on the tangential sub-thread instead, which deprives the relevant threads of comments (assuming posters that don't read the entirety of the discussion.)
However, we do have the Arc source; what is needed now is a good incentive to actually implement/fix this stuff, other than just scratching itches (because if that was enough, it would have been done by now.) "A competitor to HN that does it, runs ads, steals traffic, and makes money" wouldn't work, because the value of HN is 99% the community...
I respect and admire the ingenuity and initiative HN hacker-types have, but also recognize that those qualities tend to lead to feature-y tech-y solutions to every problem.
The problem we're having isn't technical. It's simply bad-faith comments: comments made to advance an agenda (along the theme of "what's the point of a silent boycott", ie, "yes, we're protesting, not discussing the actual topic") instead of a topical discussion. In the WL case, the fact that WL approval trends 3-1 in favor means those bad-faith comments get jacked up in rank.
This thread is also a non-topical digression from Amazon Route 53, but the whole HN item is a lost cause and the meta discussion about how HN is mishandling this is more valuable than what's actually leading here --- again: arguments about Joe Lieberman.
If I were a different sort of HN user, I'd post a "Tell HN: Please Stop With The Wikileaks Stuff". But we all know what would happen if that got posted: two Lieberman discussions.
> But we all know what would happen if that got posted: two Lieberman discussions.
And that's the thing... you can't expect people to not try to advance their own agendas. You have to make a system that's robust in the face of human nature, not expect humans to subvert their nature to use the system. There will always be something like Wikileaks (on Reddit, that something is omnipresent pun threads that can sometimes eat ten pages before you find the rest of the discussion) and asking the userbase to stop won't help (I don't think...) as long as it doesn't visibly harm anyone the user cares about ('round here, if pg says stop, you'd stop, because he's in everyone's Monkeysphere, but that's not a principle that can work in every forum.) In the tragedy of the commons, the best solution is to get better commons.
The only part of this comment thread that you are posting in is exactly rhe one about whose length you complain so loudly, and it would have been at least 50% shorter if you had not done so.
You did not discuss anything whatsoever in the rest of this thread and in spite of 'leaving people to help themselves to the last word' you keep coming back for more.
The Wikileaks incident is pretty good example of the risks of a "cloud model". Same sort of warrantless dropping of service will happen to you when something you've built is deemed undesirable (but not necessarily illegal) by the authorities.
Build a web service that people may use to share links related to piracy, or photos that may be pornographic, and you'll experience the same.
Amazon's policy is the Apple App Store all over again.
Privacy is hot in the echo chamber. Most of the world isn't scared by Facebook; it owns its market utterly. Similarly, nothing Amazon does vis a vis WL is going to make a dent in its numbers. A substantial chunk of Amazon's market thinks "Wikileaks is a traitor"; they may pick up yardage.
So is there a userscript for HN that provides Reddit-style "collapse this thread" buttons? I think that's all we really need to keep everyone happy here.
