[Peace-discuss] Fwd: People love power: Mozilla's censorship

[C G Estabrook]

> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: "J.B. Nicholson" <jbn at forestfield.org>
> Subject: People love power: Mozilla's censorship
> Date: April 27, 2019 at 8:59:21 PM CDT
> To: "C. G. Estabrook" <cgestabrook at gmail.com>, Leigh Estabrook <leighe at gmail.com>
> 
> I recommend that everyone use a free software web browser (such as Mozilla Firefox or a Firefox derivative like TorBrowser which makes it easy to use the tor network). Free software (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published computer software) gives us the freedom we need to individually and collectively make sure our programs do what we want them to do, so we remain in control of our computers. This increases the odds that we'll get the privacy and liberation from unjust power over our computers which we need and deserve.
> 
> But sometimes free software developers make choices that put prioritize power over other people. One example is Mozilla's recent announcement to discontinue using IRC (Internet Relay Chat).
> 
> IRC is a decentralized real-time textual chatting protocol that has been around since 1988. I started using it in 1989 at the University, back when UIUC was the 2nd most IRCing place in the world (#1 place was the University of Oulu in Finland where IRC was written). IRC has no power to stop its users from writing text and being read: a user can say what they want and form ad-hoc groups of other users (called an "IRC channel"). If one IRC server doesn't let a user on, there are thousands of other IRC servers to pick from. There are free software IRC servers and clients and many IRC networks (servers that all share a common set of users; joining any server in an IRC network lets one chat with other users on the same network).
> 
> Mozilla's Michael Hoye, the fellow who runs Mozilla's IRC server at irc.mozilla.org said that Mozilla wants something else:
> 
> From Hoye's blog at http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/
>> While we [Mozilla] still use it heavily, IRC is an ongoing source of
>> abuse and harassment for many of our colleagues and getting connected to
>> this now-obscure forum is an unnecessary technical barrier for anyone
>> finding their way to Mozilla via the web. Available interfaces really
>> haven’t kept up with modern expectations, spambots and harassment are
>> endemic to the platform, and in light of that it’s no coincidence that
>> people trying to get in touch with us from inside schools, colleges or corporate networks are finding that often as not IRC traffic isn’t allowed past institutional firewalls at all.
>> All of that adds up to a set of real hazards and unnecessary barriers
>> to participation in the Mozilla project; we definitely still need a globally-available, synchronous and text-first communication tool; our commitment to working in the open as an organization hasn’t changed.
>> But we’re setting a higher bar for ourselves and our communities now and
>> IRC can’t meet that bar. We’ve come to the conclusion that for all
>> IRC’s utility, it’s irresponsible of us to ask our people – employees, volunteers, partners or anyone else – to work in an environment that we can’t make sure is healthy, safe and productive.
> 
> IRC is less used than web forums but it's not clear why Hove calls IRC "obscure". There are no agreed-upon terms for such a label, so the assertion comes off as a feeble attempt to justify Mozilla's decision to discontinue their IRC server on the grounds of popularity. Mozilla could have chosen to defend continued use of a decentralized service that by its design encourages freedom of speech by prohibiting the controls that allow for censorship. But that would conflict with the control Mozilla wants to impose on its users.
> 
> People have long preferred to set up centralized forums for discussion and debate. This usually takes the form of centralizing a service. When all requests of a service go through one point (such as an email server or a web server), that chokepoint is a convenient place to implement censorship. When Hoye claims "spambots and harassment are endemic to the platform" and that Mozilla seeks "an environment that we [can] make sure is healthy, safe, and productive" he's calling for Mozilla to more effectively censor users than what IRC allows. Elsewhere in the article he states that Mozilla's to-be-determined IRC replacement system "will require authentication, because The Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines will apply, and they’ll be enforced.". This could also include a policy that users provide some means of identifying who they are via a trusted identification scheme (such as information from a state-issued ID).
> 
> These Community Participation Guidelines (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/participation/) include controlling one's speech -- it is "not acceptable [to] deliberately [refer] to someone by a gender that they do not identify with", for example, and to obey arbitrary restrictions brought up by others: "This also includes repeated subtle and/or indirect discrimination; when asked to stop, stop the behavior in question.".
> 
> Mozilla continues to develop and release free software that helps us all. The saving grace of Firefox is that it is free software; this makes Firefox recommendable even when I don't agree with some of their technical choices because I can either make the software do what I want, ask someone to make those edits on my behalf, or hire someone to edit the software for me. We're all free to do these things without obeying their Community Participation Guidelines that go well beyond what is constitutional.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20190427/0dc5c720/attachment.html>