> This means in some sense RIPE's security policies reflect what European ISPs and similar wanted, for good or ill.
Traditional routing has always been very, very open. Like a club where anyone is welcome and if new folks mess stuff up it just gets fixed.
Several IRRs used to allow RPSL changes by email to their systems with only maintainer auth and no verification of route ownership (e.g. you register with the IRR, then publish Google routes).
It’s all getting hardened nowadays with things like no more email, layers of verification, RPKI, etc.
It’s not necessarily what folks want but how this stuff had traditionally been handled. Thankfully it’s all changing because of events like this.
Love it. I do think that the "learn" section should always be open. For me (FF) after the first challenge it's closed by default which leaves just a command line and no clear direction.
If you're working on code for most of the day, you will absolutely be making decisions that enhance your experience.
Could be an editor, monitor, chair, etc. It might not seem like some of those little things matter -- if I can sit in the chair, it works for me! -- but they do to some and typography is one of those things.
I don't understand folks who don't understand this. I get it if you don't personally care about typography but every developer is making QOL decisions.
I mean sure, I get that it's a QoL thing and that some people care more than others - I'm not arguing it shouldn't matter to anyone, so much as saying I have trouble grasping what specifically about it does make it matter to those who value it highly, I guess.
I faced some issues a year or two ago. It wasn't then. It was one of the pain points many users faced. One of the issues I faced was scheduled tasks wouldn't show up in Flower. There was no way for me to know if a task was run without monitoring the database. I didn't follow after that as I moved to Dramatiq.
I am so glad to hear that the community has listened and picked it up again. Thank you for pointing it out.
This comment breaks the site guidelines: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Sinister insinuation about astroturfing is the internet's favorite pastime. The overwhelming majority of this, as far as we can tell from countless hours looking at the data, is pure imagination.
Is it possible that the manipulation is so sinister and so clever that it leaves no traces we can see in the data, and yet thousands of internet commenters see what we don't? Sure it's possible. But following that path means abandoning evidence. That way leads to the wilderness of mirrors. The only sane way to look at this is to require some evidence, some objective peg of some kind (we'll take anything!) to hang your suspicions on. The presence of opposing viewpoints, downvotes, and flags on divisive issues is no evidence at all. It just means that the community is divided.
As far as I can tell, the psychological phenomenon driving this phenomenon is that people are deeply reluctant to take in how wide the range of legitimately opposing views is. We're probably hard-wired to see the world as much smaller than it is. Bring us all, with that hard-wiring, into a community of millions of people on the internet, and the inevitable result is that people see spies, shills, astroturfers, and foreign agents everywhere. No—what you're seeing is that there are a lot of humans with very different backgrounds from yours. And on any issue with an international dimension, multiply that phenomenon by a hundred.
But what is somebody supposed to do with this list, when it contains dynamic IP addresses used by many people? Ban everything on it, based on the assumption that some of them are actually endpoints of suspicious activity, thereby preventing many innocent people from using the Internet?
At my previous company I dealt with all the scraping bots for 15 years, in the end I even banned all of Tor and many of the commercial proxy network providers, with the justification that our site (CSE) didn't need anonymous posting because there was nothing sensitive and no private information on it. But I couldn't ban dynamic IP addresses for more than a few minutes since all the abusers originating from them happily obtained a new address within seconds and continued the scraping, rendering the IP address pool used by their provider completely banned from using our site.
I should have filtered IP addresses, leaving only ranges before posting. Mea culpa.
IP addresses are blocked in a different context but land on the same list.
Still, to answer your question, dynamic IP addresses can be sticky. Where I operate, some ISPs lease the same IP address for each IP lease renewal. The only way to get an IP address is to wait until the lease expires by e.g. switching off the router.
Thanks! I'll take a look. Feel free to ping me at hn@ycombinator.com if you like—it can take time to get to something like this but we're definitely willing.
Edit: I've now had a chance to examine this data. It turns out that the IP ranges in that list are so broad as to cover more than 50% of the posts on HN.
Will you provide that data for independent review?
Edit: it's not that you shouldn't be trusted. The issue is the old “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” For example, what if a large segment of the user base, that regularly contributed extraordinarily positive engagements, existed solely for the opportunities to frame certain conversations, even in the slightest, or even in preparation for something in the distant future.
No, for the privacy reason pvg mentioned (edit: since deleted, but he made the simple point that it would violate users' privacy), and also for a different reason: it would convince no one. The only people with enough time and energy to bother looking at it would be people who already have strong views, and they would inevitably pull their preconceptions back out of the data and claim that they'd proven something.
And there's a third reason: sooner or later (maybe we're already there, maybe not yet) we have to assume a sufficiently smart manipulator (SSM) who's able to do whatever they want and be indistinguishable from a legit user. This is exactly what your phrase alludes to, I think: "regularly contributed extraordinarily positive engagements, existed solely for the opportunities to frame certain conversations". Once we're past that SSM threshold, all we can do is fall back on what the community ought to be doing anyway: answering false information with correct information, answering worse arguments with better ones, preserving community-ness without falling into war.
Since that's the only long term solution and it's what we want anyway, we might as well be practicing it now.
I think it would be helpful to enlighten people about the SSM when noting that a response is breaking the rules for an accusation of astroturfing.
For me, I think a brief explanation that well formed arguments are the only defense against an SSM would have removed a feeling of helplessness derived from reading your initial comment. And instead, lead me down a path which could really be helpful.
That's great feedback. I only thought of that "SSM" wording just now but will try to weave it into future explanations. You can see that this argument has been cooking for a while: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23839602. There are lots of other instances but I can't think of a search query to dig them up.
And it's fun to extend in the obvious ways. For instance, what if a SSM (an 'essessum', as they are often referred to in the technical literature) is orchestrating a campaign to write comments insinuating astroturfery into HN threads? After all, taken as a group such comments look very much like the kind of commentary a nefarious corporate or state actor might promote, as pointed out by the shillologists themselves! A curious and under-explored connection.
I'm just being overly self-satisfied with the idea a shadowy army of shillologists and astoTERFs are diabolically manipulating HN by darkly warning about shilling and astroturfing for unknown but definitely nefarious ends.
It sounds like you’re saying you’re fine with users doing things like creating unlimited sock puppet accounts and engaging in vote manipulation (which is what the troll farms you’re describing as SSMs have been accused of doing)? I’m genuinely not trying to be snide here—I’m just reading “we won’t enforce the rules because someone’s probably smart enough to break them (i.e. ‘do whatever they want’) and get away with it”. Is it officially okay for HN users to engage in coordinated inauthentic behavior?
It's just that we need to have some evidence, something objective to go on, before we ban people. Absent that (<-- note that I said absent that), what one is encountering on the internet is a gigantic Rohrschach diagram, in which people routinely see the opposite of what they like or identify with. This internet experience is like being surrounded by demons of one's own creation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Sock puppet accounts and vote manipulation are not what I understood BrianOnHN to be talking about upthread. Maybe one could adapt the point to those cases though. Imagine someone who was coordinating inauthentic behavior so cleverly that we couldn't detect it at all. Fortunately I don't think we're there yet—but of course we wouldn't know it if we were. Either way, just imagine for a moment that this is the case. What are our options? The way I see it, we have two:
1. Go after each other based on subjective interpretations of whatever deviousness we imagine we see;
2. Have a functioning community with a healthy immune system based on clear thinking and good arguments.
Surely we all choose #2, at least in our better moments. The key insight here is that #2 doesn't depend on what manipulators, even the cleverest manipulators, do. It depends on us. I'm not saying that it's the only defense we have against manipulation; I'm saying that if the day ever comes when it is the only defense we have, well, it's what we ought to be doing anyway, so we should work at getting good at it now.
I don’t think it’s possible. We have huge amount of evidences. This article alone has 150 references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency They include analysis of internet activity of state-sponsored trolls, insider leaks, and even documents from US courts.
I don't think that wording is very accurate, but certainly there is a wide range of geopolitical opinion among real, legitimate HN users. There's no question about it—anyone who wants to pore over just the public history of commenters here can easily establish this. Besides that, it would be bizarre if it weren't the case. Why should the disagreements and conflicts that pervade the world somehow be absent here?
That's my point, in fact. The spectrum of legitimate opinion is much wider than people imagine it is. When they encounter views which don't belong on their much-smaller imaginary spectrum, they don't go "wow, I wonder what your background is that you would see this so differently than I do!", they go "Shill! Manipulator spy! Putin poison puppet! GRU agent!" and similar variations.
Here's another version of this comment from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23867707. That was in the different context of China not Russia, but the internet dynamics in all these cases are exactly the same—which, btw, is strong evidence that they're not really about what people say they are.
I didn't say there was "no consistent astroturfing", but rather that (a) we've found no evidence of it (on geopolitical topics—corporate propaganda is a different issue) and (b) there needs to be evidence of it before taking action against it. I've been posting this for years—alas it's not clear that it has any effect. This is starting to feel a tad Sisyphean.
Are we the best at finding evidence, or even particularly qualified? How would I know? I'd never claim we were. But surely you're not arguing that we should take action without finding evidence, and the argument, "get better at finding evidence until you find the evidence that I'm sure must be there" is pretty questionable too. This way of thinking leads into the wilderness of mirrors. There are much simpler explanations for everything we see in the comments on China, Russia, unions (that one came up today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24344699) and whatever else people are battling about in HN threads.
Are all companies selling such services charlatans?
Not sure I buy it. It's well established that you can buy followers, reviews, positive comments and even stories on all large public platforms, and they are quite public about it.
Sure it exists. We've banned people for it. I've scolded them publicly for it, too, in the hope of discouraging others from doing similar things. So no, what I'm saying is that it's wrong to claim astroturfing without evidence, and the mere fact of someone posting a comment that you feel is wrong—even outrageously, perversely wrong—is not evidence of astroturfing. It's evidence merely that they have a different view than you.
I can't speak about other forums but as far as I'm aware there's one outfit that sells HN votes and comments and stories. What their customers don't seem to realize is that using that service will get them banned here. At this point I figure the spammers know this too, but since people still buy from them, they probably don't care. I doubt they get much repeat business though.
I think many Russian people, especially those who watch or read mainly Russian news, hold such views with complete sincerity. The internal propaganda is quite effective.
Not a secret russian government spends considerable resources on online astroturfing but there are large constituency of closet (or not so closet) putin supporters even among tech folks of 30yo and older (basically people who were alive and old enough to remember 90s and 80s)
It’s quite anecdotal but my sampling is rather large as I’ve worked with those people over multiple years and still have contacts there. Nobody would admit they approve of this assassination obviously same as mh17 but as long as putin maintains plausible deniability they’d be ok with supporting him
By matching what happens in Belarus now to Russia.
It was long believed, even in US, that Lukashenka had the majority. In reality, he faked all elections since 1994.
Once his deeds became hard to ignore even for pathetically peaceful Belarusians, all the population turned against him. Gosh, the exit poll in my voting station recorded only one vote for Lukashenka among 358. I was there watching the exit poll for a couple of hours. I fully trust the organizers, but one in 358... I could not even imagine it.
Same for Russia.
P.S. Yes, I have a Belarusian passeport. Yes, I run a Russian-speaking community site. Pass on.
The election results had him at ~80% votes, if he is really rigging elections, would he really go for such unrealistic numbers. If I have just 40% support, I might go for showing it to be about 55%, so that it at least looks close.
I think he did rig elections but he might have had majority already, which makes his numbers look so unrealistic or he is just plain stupid to not even rig elections to make them look believable.
I do really sympathize with the Belarussian people though, every community should get a say on who represents them.
I am from Kazakhstan. If you've ever heard of it, would you consider it to be an autocratic state? Because according to the official results our beloved leader received 98% of votes in an election a few years back. Now that's an unrealistic number for sure.
>if he is really rigging elections, would he really go for such unrealistic number
You are assuming someone has an overview of the rigging being done. It's probably more chaotic than that. If 1000 different people are chucking opponents' votes into furnaces, how do you coordinate hitting that number?
That depends on whether the purpose of the election result is to be universally accepted as an accurate reflection of public sentiment or just to say, the opposition couldn't have won
And how does what happens in Belarus match what happens in Russia? Lukashenka and Putin are different kinds of people, they do different politics, Russian and Belarussian governments are not that alike. Just because both of them are "dictators" doesn't mean their people think the same about them.
Putin's approval rating is actually pretty high even when measured by NGOs sponsored by the "West". You'll be surprised, but it is quoted to be 60% in July 2020. [1]
1. The legacy of 8 decades under a government practicing public polling under a gunpoint.
2. Only the most well fed, and carefree Potemkin villages can be surveyed.
3. The lack of any other genuine option other than saying "I back a complete joke "alternative" candidates," which are set up by the regime itself to play Pope Gapon
I am referring to polling agencies that are very west-leaning, and even they can't blatantly lie about it. His approval rating as of a month ago is 59-60% [1][2][3].
In fact his approval rating after the annexation of Crimea was at all time high of 85%. Check the sources. Again, these are not government-run polls.
And I am not saying Putin did or didn't order the poisoning of Navalny. I am just saying he is not the only one with motive/opportunity contrary to popular belief pushed in the mainstream media propaganda.
Polling in developed democracies has errors of a few percentage points, even with extensive work done to improve the accuracy of the results, correct for various sampling biases, etc. What do you think the error bars of a poll in an authoritarian country are, especially one that asks 'Do you like the authoritarian leader'.
As to Crimea, plenty of Russians believe Crimea is Russian, including Navalny - the Russian opposition is neither monolithic nor does it always represent views that in lock-step with Western ones.
So you guys don’t trust the polls results because polls in Russia are obviously inaccurate. You also don’t trust the Russians who said that from their experience, there’s still a huge number of people supporting the current president - because that’s only the Kremlin bots who would say that. Though for some reason you immediately believe a person who says that the majority of population is against Putin, not providing a single proof. Doesn’t that tell us that you actually speak with voices in your head and trust only what these voices say?
There’s a thing that you should understand about Russia.
Here it goes: Russia is a huge country and Moscow is only a part of it. A small and the richest part. Moscow is basically a country inside the country. It has almost nothing to do with Russia. And the overwhelming majority of the information you are getting is coming from Moscow only.
The polls, the internet blabbering, the protests happen in Moscow, mostly (do notice that I said “mostly” before calling me a liar. I’m well aware of the exceptions, believe me). All of the money is there as well - all the cash flow through the capital. All the money from regions flow through Moscow and only a small portion of it goes back.
People from Moscow mostly look down upon the people from the regions. Consciously or not. Some of them are outright aggressive towards the “country folks”. Many of them believe that Moscow is “feeding the regions”, and it should stop, because people there are lazy and not smart enough. I’ve had conversations like this with Muscovites during my life there, it was hilarious.
The rest of the country is concentrated on their own lives. The majority of them earn something around $300USD a month that barely allows them to live from pay check to pay check. Teachers, doctors, you name it. That’s the salary of low-skilled workers in Moscow.
These people realise that changing the president won’t help them, but in fact might make their lives miserable. And they are not wrong - I can only imagine what may start after the change of leadership and what consequences for the regions it might have.
This country has its roots in the USSR. The change in the headquarters won’t replace the people in charge in the regions - at least it won’t happen immediately. And if/when it does, the majority of the replacement would be just the same people from the same ruling party (or what’s left of it). That’s how things work in Russia, that’s how it’s always been, since 1917. That’s the system that we have. That’s us, Russians, who are the system, and the president is only a small part of the problem.
The majority of Russians either don’t use Internet or use it for social networking only.
The majority of Russians don’t have an international passport (the document that allows you to travel abroad). Why would they? They will never have the money to travel.
The majority of Russians that I know, people from outside Moscow, vote for Putin. Some of them do that because they support him and the ruling party, but the most of them (as per my personal experience) just believe that he’s a lesser evil. I can’t blame them for that.
There’s more to that. What I’m trying to say here is - Russia is far more complex and diverse than you guys might think. It’s not very obvious even for many Russians. So please, don’t downvote people who say things that are against your agenda simply because of that fact. Their reasoning might be more subtle than you think.
What you might want to do to better understand them is to ask them. They know better than you about the situation over there, the historical reasons and consequences. The only thing that you probably need to ask them first is where are they from. If they are from Moscow, chances are they are biased.
Well, thanks for explaining Russia to me (I'm one person though, not guys) but nothing you've written suggests we have accurate data on the support Putin enjoys. In fact, 'support' of the sort we typically think of, expressed in a poll for a democratically elected leader subject to periodic free and fair elections, is not really a commensurable quantity with 'support' for an authoritarian leader who's clung to power for a couple of decades.
I definitely believe you. A Russian colleague, who is living in EU for several years, found it justified that Russia invaded Poland back in 1940. We were all baffled.
>seems that holding joint parades, signing secret pacts, sacrificing Comintern, etc, still did not help much.
Neither did appeasement. The correct response to Ribbentrop's suggestions was war on Germany, just like the correct choice at the Munich agreement was war on Germany. Beyond that, you're just choosing between bad options.
Anecdotally, my inlaws who are NOT Russian also hold pro-Putin and pro-Lukashenko views. I avoid politics with them.
Why? Because they mostly watch Russian TV (those Russian WW2 serials are addicting). The propaganda in the Russian TV talk shows and news is very well done.
It is just like any other echo chamber. Just like watching Fox News,listening to Limbaugh in US, etc.
There are echo chambers for all political spectrums and all countries.
It's OK to disagree with other people. It's OK to have civilized discussions about these topic, despite the disagreement.
Avoiding some topics in fear of insulting/upsetting other party, or in context of social media in fear of downvotes/flags, is the main cause of these modern echo-chambers.
Yep. There have always been echo chambers where hostile international relations, repressing rival political movements and even open corruption are seen as good things by millions of people in established liberal democracies.
Why would it be surprising this might also be the case for many Russians, with an existing tradition of hostile international relations with the West, and more repressive and corrupt governments, especially when many Russians also felt a lot poorer before Putin arrived?
I'm training a machine learning model that honeypots commenters like you with provocative news articles. Next, the comments section is cleaned up to eliminate commenter spam. It works amazingly well!
Good grief. You posted this 7 times. That's obviously abusive and obviously a bannable offense. I'm not going to ban you because I understand how crazy-making it is to represent a minority/contrarian view and feel surrounded. But please don't do it again. Also, you were posting unsubstantive and flamebait comments more than once before that. Can you please not? We're trying for something better than that here. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
So let's drink to this comrades. I know I do; with all the trucking Russians everywhere. Novojstai! Let's drink buddies. Let's run the planets to the grounds. Davoi!. Let's drink vodka(s). Trucking russians.....
EDIT: I literally drink heavily due to the fucking russians. Russia and china should be nuked to the ground. Fucking basic tactics. Fuck these pieces of shits.
oh lol Dang is a russian operative. What could be better. My fucking post is flagged already. What could be worse. Fuck this network; ruled by russia and china, it seems. ADIOS. Good win fuckstar communist cockholes.
Until we have evidence that would carry in a court of law and assign blame at a person/country - divides in opinion will prevail and assigning those divides into categories serves no constructive purpose beyond distract from debate upon the facts.
Russian fanboys, sure. Actual Russian security forces, doubtful. They aren't idiots. They aren't going to pick a fight on HN were things are so easily moderated/downvoted/flagged. The real agents work deep inside their facebook/twitter/whatsapp nests. What we have here are pro-russia but nevertheless amature activists.
Again with the blanket accusations of astroturfing without any proof. Crying shill whenever you encounter an opposing opinion is not something a rational and free-thinking person does. What you're basically doing is refusing to engage intellectually on certain viewpoints which just so happen to go against the interests of your home country's government. From the perspective of an outsider, it looks a lot like the result of brainwashing.
I agree with you in principle, but the way you expressed it reads too much like a personal attack for my taste. I don't think it's a good way to make the discussion more rational after the initial accusation of astroturfing.
Of course it is, but responding to a personal attack with another personal attack doesn't negate the original one, it just adds another on top. If you want to be able to have a calmly rational discussion, you need to be able to resist responding to disruptive comments in kind, otherwise it only takes a single person to derail an entire conversation and ruin it for everyone.
Being unable to engage with certain viewpoints to the point of bringing up foreign infiltrators every time you see it is a sign of brainwashing. I stated that as calmly as possible. I have received far worse replies on this forum.
What really derails the conversation is needlessly tone-policing people. People have a tendency of only doing that to opinions they disagree with; so in practice it's just another way to start a flamewar.
I commented on your tone exactly because I frequently find myself agreeing with you when other people don't. If I disagree with someone in both content and tone, I won't bother engaging, I'll just downvote, flag and move on.
You are pushing this idea so hard and blasting this thread with copy/paste comments. It's obvious you're excited about it and that's great but there is a lot that isn't shown and that's where the real work is being done.
Just because it looks like magic, doesn't mean there isn't someone pulling some strings somewhere else to aid the illusion.
>You are pushing this idea so hard and blasting this thread with copy/paste comments.
I'm sorry but this comment is absurd. I'm assuming you are insinuating that I am astroturfing for OpenAI which is against guidelines. Not only that but in fact none of my comments are copy pasted so its doubly ridiculous.
>Just because it looks like magic
No is saying it's magic but the thread is full of people saying: "Uhh my random prompt got bad results, this is just hype, blah blah blah..." People looking for excuses to trash the model instead of seeing what it could mean for the industry going forward. None of this is married to OpenAi either, there are plenty of groups replicating GPT and they will likely have similar capabilities.
Growth is the implied motivation for not cutting down on fake news, astroturfing, and bots. When you are selling yourself on engagement and user numbers, you have an incentive to continue allowing fake engagement and users.
Except for all those bots counting as users for growth, and the fake engagement by bots counting as growth, and the fake news driving real clicks from real people counting as growth........
Traditional routing has always been very, very open. Like a club where anyone is welcome and if new folks mess stuff up it just gets fixed.
Several IRRs used to allow RPSL changes by email to their systems with only maintainer auth and no verification of route ownership (e.g. you register with the IRR, then publish Google routes).
It’s all getting hardened nowadays with things like no more email, layers of verification, RPKI, etc.
It’s not necessarily what folks want but how this stuff had traditionally been handled. Thankfully it’s all changing because of events like this.