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rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome
that time when I worked at the print shop and wouldn't make copies of aborted fetuses for the local antiabortion crank definitely made me a fascist.

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Arcteryx Anarchist
Sep 15, 2007

Fun Shoe
i mean i'm sure some lawyer can dance around those terms already

this is just good old trying to solve a political problem with a technical solution aka dumb poo poo

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome

lancemantis posted:

this is just good old trying to solve a political problem with a technical solution aka dumb poo poo

exactly. The license will never enforce morality for you. So abandon the license and enforce it yourself, because you're the only person who can.

Share Bear
Apr 27, 2004

Is it legally enforceable, assuming you open source stuff you made (and to rotor's point, that you might have made a mistake doing so), to say "Everyone can use this except for these entities"

DaTroof
Nov 16, 2000

CC LIMERICK CONTEST GRAND CHAMPION
There once was a poster named Troof
Who was getting quite long in the toof
i'm kinda starting to regret open sourcing that python script i wrote to scrape whitepages.com for addresses of people whose last name ends with a z

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome

Share Bear posted:

Is it legally enforceable, assuming you open source stuff you made (and to rotor's point, that you might have made a mistake doing so), to say "Everyone can use this except for these entities"

As far as I know, and in the US, yes. You can put whatever you want in a license. As long as you're not discriminating against a federally protected class (ie "jews may not use my software") its fine.

Now whether you can append stuff after the fact I don't know and probably depends on a lot of things.

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde
i don't care OP, this whole campaign is super creepy tbh

Progressive JPEG
Feb 19, 2003

if you own the copyright to the whole project (aka haven’t accepted contributions from other people or other people signed over copyright to you) then I think you can change the license whenever you want, but I think this doesn’t retroactively apply to previous copies that had been distributed under the prior license

so like google or fsf projects where they require all contributors to sign over copyright can be switched over whenever but the Linux kernel with thousands of contributors (some now dead and represented by their estates) would be easier to rewrite than to get a new license. the fsf at least argue that they do this for another reason: as the copyright holder to a whole project it makes it easier for the fsf to enforce the license if there’s a violation

but I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, so spend the :20bux: to get a real opinion if you’re serious about it

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome
idk if i was clear or not but i think the person on twitters idea for a "no human rights abuses" license is dumb but I'm glad to see the list online of code that enables child prisons, maybe people will start think of how to deal with this problem.

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde
i wasn't really impressed with the attempt a few years back to pin the holocaust on ibm either

MononcQc
May 29, 2007

One thing I won't do is take it on my shoulder to inherit the moral responsibilities of other people.

I.e. if I'm developing something that is arguably neutral and a priori has no political implications aside from granting some level of effectiveness or correctness ("a tool that lists directories", "a code linter", "a thing that backs up your own files"), I am not doing a thing that is inherently wrong. I.e. "making communications faster and more reliable" can of course be used by people wanting to do nasty poo poo, but also has tons of positive applications. Evil uses of it are out of my control, because there's no inherent negative potential for it.

If I invent crampons so people stop slipping on ice or steel-toed boots, I won't keep the invention or the concept private because it also allows bad actors to kick people more effectively for it; there are obvious benefits that neutral or non-evil actors will have out of it, and I would expect the rest of society to cover or regulate around the bad actors usage of it.

OTOH, some pieces of tech have visibly easy negative effects, because they require large budget that only big corporations or state actors would have: spying, face recognition, etc. They are seen positively by bootlickers who believe that heightened state control and law inforcement is inherently good because law is equal to morality, and if something is legal, it can't be immoral. As someone who doesn't ascribe to that view, I see an inherent risk to creating ideas or software clearly oriented towards making that use case easier.

Then you get the in-betweeners: stronger cryptography or gene-sequencing. They can be good to help individuals secure or protect their own communications, or for scientists to develop new medicine. They can also be used by criminals to hide from law enforcement and eugenicists to do terrible poo poo. At that point, the technology can go out, but I would expect to only open it around the right fora and actors that can ensure a good amount of public discourse to protect the public around these things. They're not inherently evil, but you have to exert restraint over what you open up because their usage isn't inherently symmetric or good.

In short: I'm not feeling ethical responsibilities with regards to state actors using my build tool, because anyone can use them, and my initial intent is often giving newcomers a better user experience around the ecosystem. However, with a security issue, the guidelines about responsible disclosure are interesting: I want the issue to be fixed before it is disclosed to give time to good actors to adjust before exploiters to take over something. I want things to be known (for general safety) but want to give the time for the issue to be fixed so the general public has a time to adapt and fix things before new bad actors know of it -- unless it's proven to be exploited in the wild where you gotta haul rear end.

But it's not true that I would equate security research to helping nazis because nazis can use the new security holes and that my responsibility as a code write or authors are absolute. I think they need to be put within the proper context, and that the creative leap from "using a tree data structure" to "using a tree data structure to track minorities better" has to incur the majority of the blame, because the dots are far more difficult to connect there compared to "using an app that tracks ethnic markers" where it's almost an invitation for hate groups.

MononcQc fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jan 29, 2020

Progressive JPEG
Feb 19, 2003

ive got a dns filter thing I’m working on that is prototype stage rn but pretty much :can: in the hands of Bad People. thinking pretty hard about switching it from stock gpl3 to one of these

i wonder what the og Open Source peeps takes are on the idea nowadays. I mean mid-2000s they were all “can be used by abortion clinics and antiabortion protestors alike!!” but I wonder if they’ve changed their tone since then

qirex
Feb 15, 2001

when I was a kid I went to space camp and there was a lecture by this old german dude [not von braun] and 10 years later when I was in college I was watching a history channel show about operation paperclip and dude who I saw at space camp's picture popped up on the screen and it blew my mind

MononcQc
May 29, 2007

MononcQc posted:

If I invent crampons so people stop slipping on ice or steel-toed boots, I won't keep the invention or the concept private because it also allows bad actors to kick people more effectively for it; there are obvious benefits that neutral or non-evil actors will have out of it, and I would expect the rest of society to cover or regulate around the bad actors usage of it.

while I'm at it, this bit above is why I think the campaign is interesting. It's not that I blame the js-linter people for their support of ICE, it's that they're trying to find ways to empower people who see their creations used for bad deals where governments and legal frameworks have clearly failed the people to do something about it. In the end, putting a tricky license or pulling the library fixes nothing over a moderately evil actor that is state-supported (if you jail babies for the govt, you can just not respect licenses and also vendor your dependencies) and be untouchable; the bigger impact is in a kind of disrupting protest move that raises awareness and hopefully makes employees at the evil companies realize they're being lovely.

if it makes people question their ethics, it's probably good, even if I don't think it's reasonable to assign blame to neutral tools for the evils of a corporation or government, who should bear the full responsibility of the poo poo they're doing.

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde
i decided over a decade ago that i wouldn't seek employment in military/police tech projects (which were plentiful in my area) which is fine because i think those jobs are mostly reserved for vets anyway. aside from that i'd rather eat than moralize

Arcteryx Anarchist
Sep 15, 2007

Fun Shoe
i work in a very much grey area that will remain grey as long as I maintain a strong cognitive dissonance

ask me about maintaining a strong cognitive dissonance please dont

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome

MononcQc posted:

just how much responsibility are you willing to take for the inhuman horrors unethical actors can unleash with the help of your code, which was mainly expected to be terrible and nothing more?

I think this is the wrong question. I think the right question is: what are you willing and capable of doing when you find your code being used by unethical actors to unleash inhuman horrors.

Arcteryx Anarchist
Sep 15, 2007

Fun Shoe
do you really want to know the answer to either part of that question?

JawnV6
Jul 4, 2004

So hot ...
i had a friend approach me for Palantir a few years back and, under the apparently mistaken assumption that it'd be $$$, had some internal wrestling to do before eventually turning them down. they'd been doing satellite stuff for a while and were thoroughly in the "where they come down isn't my department" mindset

idk why everyone has to have an ICE contract tho. and taking, as a point of pride, very little money from them doesn't seem like the best defense

Gazpacho posted:

i wasn't really impressed with the attempt a few years back to pin the holocaust on ibm either
what 'attempt'?

ibm took nazi money to make their holocaust tabulators. the computer history museum has a section, it's not some secret. or are you confusing accurately describing their horror adjacency as 'pinning' the blame in a dearth of nuance?

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome

lancemantis posted:

do you really want to know the answer to either part of that question?

Given that i retain copyright to all source code I've released on my own behalf, I know what I would do. I can and would revoke their rights to use it.

I can do that because I didn't just give it away and say "whatever, i don't care who uses this or how, and here's a legal document to that effect, never bother me again"

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome
I mean in the interests of full disclosure no one to my knowledge actually uses that code. Which is fine, I don't give a poo poo if people chose to avail themselves of my volunteer labor or not.

Arcteryx Anarchist
Sep 15, 2007

Fun Shoe
i guess my implication there is, circularly, if you were to ask the question and find out that someone is using it for terrible ends, and I guess you know your answer to someone doing that, for which their retort is "whos going to stop me?", would you have ever wanted to know in the first place?

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome

lancemantis posted:

i guess my implication there is, circularly, if you were to ask the question and find out that someone is using it for terrible ends, and I guess you know your answer to someone doing that, for which their retort is "whos going to stop me?", would you have ever wanted to know in the first place?

i'm honestly not sure what the question here is.

Would I want to know if someone awful was using my work? Absolutely

Would I go to court to stop them? I suppose that would depend on a lot of things, such as whether i had the time & money to do so

Would I prefer to remain ignorant that my code was being used to electrocute children or whatever? Hell no.

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005



[ASK] me about OS/2 Warp

DaTroof posted:

i'm kinda starting to regret open sourcing that python script i wrote to scrape whitepages.com for addresses of people whose last name ends with a z

boy howdy im heated about this

Arcteryx Anarchist
Sep 15, 2007

Fun Shoe
I guess I'm just a person that's lost a lot of faith in institutions so maybe my thought patterns come off as weird

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome

lancemantis posted:

I guess I'm just a person that's lost a lot of faith in institutions so maybe my thought patterns come off as weird

like are you trying to say that I might not be able to enforce a EULA against ChildPrisons LLC?

Arcteryx Anarchist
Sep 15, 2007

Fun Shoe
Sure

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome

if you think that would be the case then don't give away your code.

Arcteryx Anarchist
Sep 15, 2007

Fun Shoe
Yeah but I don't find not doing anything to be an especially satisfying way to live life

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome

lancemantis posted:

Yeah but I don't find not doing anything to be an especially satisfying way to live life

Yeah, I get that. If you can't give away your source code to anyone who asks for it, without regard to who they are, why even bother being alive?

Share Bear
Apr 27, 2004

Consequences? In MY profession? I'm sorry sir, but if you read The Cathedral and the Bazaar you'll clearly see

Arcteryx Anarchist
Sep 15, 2007

Fun Shoe
i mean we live in a world where states straw purchase drugs for lethal injections, companies engage in illegal behavior and people aren't even aware of it much less care about it

its pretty bleak and i'm pretty cynical

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome

lancemantis posted:

i mean we live in a world where states straw purchase drugs for lethal injections, companies engage in illegal behavior and people aren't even aware of it much less care about it

its pretty bleak and i'm pretty cynical

it's very bleak but being cynical is not helping. There are small things we can all do to effect change.

MononcQc
May 29, 2007

it's forever been true that the individual feels powerless, but as long as they all individually choose to do the work that makes the machine work, they're somehow complicit. I guess we're mostly trying to assign how much complicity there should be here, from "none, I am the oppressed" to "I am the one giving the orders at the top".

I guess the precedent for that poo poo are the Nuremberg principles with some interesting stuff around command responsibility, but the less you trust actual authority to resolve things, the more you are forced to propagate responsibility to counter-act towards the street and the lowest levels.

In my mind most tech folks who just write a rando JS lib can't be held accountable, but can make a lot of noise through disruption. First those that work directly in companies like Palantir, then those that work into adjacent ones like Google or Microsoft/Github, later those who just write rando util libraries that are clearly not contextualized for this, followed by more general devs unrelated to the whole ordeal and general population.

I guess there's just always enough people who align their morals with autority/law as a framework to keep the machine working from the top-down unless larger movements counteract them.

Arcteryx Anarchist
Sep 15, 2007

Fun Shoe
the alienation is real

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde
in before someone does another left-pad and breaks the world to screw palantir

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome
yeah I mentioned it in irc and I'll repro it here:

I think everyone is focused on preventing bad poo poo before the fact and that seems like an unreachable goal.

I think the important, workable goal is to provide remediation after the fact.

Like I don't care a lot about giving away source code. Go nuts. I just want people to retain the power to take back the source code if it turns out John Q Babystrangler is using it in his baby strangling business.

rotor
Jun 11, 2001

classic case of pineapple derangement syndrome
i mean assuming that you're not cool with strangling babies

CRIP EATIN BREAD
Jun 24, 2002

Hey stop worrying bout my acting bitch, and worry about your WACK ass music. In the mean time... Eat a hot bowl of Dicks! Ice T



Soiled Meat
depends, really

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Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde
what if the baby is hitler

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