[sneak]

> One surprising side effect of having a .xyz domain is that the mere inclusion of .xyz inside of a text message will result in a silent delivery failure for many providers.

Why are people afraid to use the real term for this?

It's called censorship.

Your provider is silently censoring your text messages. In peacetime. You can't expect it to improve when that's no longer the case.

[LeifCarrotson]

Censorship has strong connotations of authoritarian regimes with political motivations. When they're doing it in peacetime with (I believe) a genuine goal to benefit the user by removing spam messages or by making abbreviated URLs like 'spot.xyz' clickable (even if that parser is broken, written by someone who only expected .com/.net/.org), it's just called parsing.

In much the same way, propaganda is just advertising with negative connotations, and a cult is just a religion with negative connotations. Calling all advertising propaganda or all religious people cultists is not likely to win people to your cause.

[burnished]

Censorship is part of an agenda. This is not censorship, and you calling that waters the phrase down. If I have a poorly constructed email filter, is that censorship? I wouldn't say so, and this example is more in line with that than with any active censorship.

So, in short, no one is afraid to call something censorship, I think they are just waiting for the right time. When it is applicable.

[sneak]

Hiding spam from users is an agenda, so therefore my usage complies with your definition.

[burnished]

Do you think that furthered the conversation, or are you trying to score points? Or perhaps my meaning was unclear?

[blowski]

Let's say I have a rule to block emails that mention "bitcoin" from arriving in my inbox. Is that censorship?

Let's say, so many people have set up a similar rule that the email provider offers a quick way of adding that very rule. Is that censorship?

Let's say, so many people use that "quick way" that the email provider turns it on by default. Is that censorship?

[Lammy]

Yeah, of course. How would it be possible to have censorship at all if "so many" people didn't tolerate it?

[mindslight]

No, No, Yes. "Censorship" comes from the word "censor" - an intermediary who controls speech. Programmers need to stop assuming that every situation is scale- and convenience-invariant.

[blowski]

If the email provider says "Would you like us to add a set of rules people tend to add?", is that censorship?

There's a very fuzzy line somewhere, on one side of which a provider is helping users get what they want, and on the other is blocking content they don't want users to receive. I'm exploring where that line is.

While you have a right to send emails to me, I have a right to sign up for a service that automatically blocks emails I don't want to receive. The line is crossed when that service starts blocking emails I would like to receive. I'd say there is a pretty competitive market of email providers, and the rules are reasonably transparent about what's being blocked. Thus, it seems that "censorship" is a rather strong accusation here.

[mindslight]

I would say the line has to do with how informed/empowered the user is about the initial content, ongoing changes, and their ability to make their own modifications.

The original comment was about text messages, of which there is certainly not a competitive market (the Ma Bell T-1000 has reassembled itself into only 3 remaining pieces), users were surprised at the behavior, and there doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to opt out of stupid rules like blocking whole TLDs. So it's a far way from being able to say that such blocking represents the will of the user.

[blowski]

What if users don't want to be informed, or make their own modifications? What if they just want a click a button and not receive junk mail, albeit also not receiving the occasional non-junk email because it had an unusual address.

I'd guess there are far more users like that, which is precisely why there are no major email providers offering the kind of service you talk about.

As always comes up in these conversations, while you have a right to speak, users have a right not to listen, and to use tools to help accomplish that.

[mindslight]

You say you are "exploring where that line is", but then continue pushing a single sided view by conjuring some perfect user archtype who simultaneously has very strong opinions but also can't be bothered to express them. I know users are unreasonable, but completely discounting their agency does not make for reasonable analysis.

I've merely put forth a straightforward definition of "censorship" - one where there is a third party censor who controls the content of speech.

To translate your scenario into an earlier time - if most people in a society don't want to hear thoughts that conflict with the teachings of the church, and they appoint someone to an office to approve play manuscripts before they're performed, is that censorship?

If merely labeling centralized user-uninvolved content filtering with the technical term of "censorship" makes you uncomfortable, then perhaps you need to revisit your own assumptions.

[teddyh]

> Programmers need to stop assuming that every situation is scale- and convenience-invariant.

I’ve seen it termed the “All Ns are equally likely” fallacy. I.e. when programmers write code, they know that they should write different code for when N is 0, for when N is 1, but as soon as it goes higher, most programmers tend to write code which is optimized for arbitrary values of N, even though in actual practice N might almost always be, say, at most 10. This often leads to inefficient and overcomplicated code, where a simpler algorithm might be faster most of the time while still able to correctly, if more slowly, deal with non-typical values of N.

[RyJones]

perhaps it's a parsing error, like the bug yesterday about usernames may not end in MIME types? SMSC[0] is re-implemented many times.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Message_service_center

[duskwuff]

Given the context, it's absolutely a spam thing. When the .XYZ gTLD launched, registrars were incentivized to discount it aggressively, sometimes as low as $1 for the first year. Spammers loved this.

[wongarsu]

It's spam protection. Which I guess is a form of censorship, especially in a medium like SMS that has no built-in way to mark something as spam and still deliver it.

[burnished]

I'd argue its not censorship. If I don't pick up your call because I don't recognize the number, or my phone is on silent, is that censorship? Lacking an agenda or a message I'd hesitate to call anything censorship.

Like, without a censor actually redacting things or controlling the conversation, can it really be called censorship?

[marcosdumay]

It's not censorship if one of the peers on the conversation do it. It's certainly censorship if a monopolistic or oligopolistic platform does it. And there's a lot of middle ground where things get hard,

[burnished]

>>It's certainly censorship if a monopolistic or oligopolistic platform does it

this seems like a good point, I'll have to think on it. For this particular situation I'm having a hard time seeing the argument on the basis that .xyz domains are cheap and get used for lots of attacks as stated in the article, so is it censorship or defense?

I think the question at the heart of my disagreement would be "what speech is being censored?", I don't see a compelling answer so I have a hard time seeing it as censorship at all.

[marcosdumay]

It would get deep into the grey area if Google users had any capacity of enabling the communications with those sites. As of today, Google is the one in control of the communications, and dictate who can reach anybody over most of the internet. They just don't have a policy of empowering their users to decide who they want to talk to.

What speech is being censored is harder to discover. They are blocking people from communication without any feedback, and it would take a large effort to reach them and discover who they are. Certainly most of what is blocked is spam, but that's true for whatever block you implement today, unless you spend an unreasonable amount of resources targeting it into non-spam.

[burnished]

OK, I think we are probably pretty close in agreement. I still don't think censorship is the appropriate word here but also want to be clear that is what I am disagreeing about, not any of the larger issues.

[lopis]

Spam protection is very hard, so xyz was sacrificed because most of it was spam. Filtering out viagra pills junk mail from your inbox is also censorship.

[ThrowawayR2]

Censorship would be intentionally preventing people from seeing something that they want to see. Here, the main intent is to prevent spam and nobody wants to see spam.

Even as a free speech advocate, it's hard to see a problem with this.

[sneak]

False positives mean that they are censoring things that aren't spam, as illustrated in TFA.

[unethical_ban]

You'll find I agree that the concept of silently spam filtering on TLD of a link is something that pisses me off.

You'll also find that calling this "censorship" as if it has to do with government action, or that it has to do with the content of the specific site, is ludicrous.

This is incompetence, not malice.

[teddyh]

Censorship is far from not limited to government action. I see this misconception a lot, and I believe it comes from Americans misinterpreting their first amendment.

[unethical_ban]

I figured that might come up, but censorship whether govt. or not is seen as "oppression due to opinion".

Over-aggressive TLD spam filtering is just bad logic from infosec employees.

[teddyh]

Censorship is not limited to “oppression due to opinion”, it can be done for any reason.

[unethical_ban]

Well there's where we disagree - on the common usage and context of the word.

[teddyh]

If someone omits or deletes people’s texts for racist reasons, that is still censorship, even though it is not done for the opinions of the people who are being censored.