Standards organisations, which make and own copyright to proprietary texts which will be necessary to understand and enforce laws such as the EU's AI Act, which mandate them and refer to them directly, are making it even harder to access standards by instituting pretty nasty Adobe DRM. Many of these document are considered part of EU law for the purposes of preliminary references. See this from the BSI now. #standards #AIAct
@mikarv I’d shake my head but it’s already at risk of falling off my shoulders.
@aral @mikarv Yikes. I’ve been quite disturbed that RFCs are jailed at ietf·org, which a few yrs ago joined the exclusive #walledGarden of #Cloudflare. RFCs are standards but at least the law does not refer to them. It’s an even greater more disturbing injustice when access to written *law* (for which everyone is accountable to) has any kind of exclusivity of access.
@koherecoWatchdog @aral @mikarv
Can RFCs not be reproduced and mirrored arbitrarily?
@koherecoWatchdog @mikarv @aral
The problem with various standards that are part of law is worse: their redistribution is restricted or outright forbidden (via copyright).
@robryk @koherecoWatchdog @aral yeah i really don’t see the idea that RFCs are hosted/protected/whatever by Cloudflare as being an access barrier. It may be an ideological challenge to IETF etc, but realistically many standards cost hundreds of dollars (!) and obtaining an RFC is free and takes seconds.
@mikarv @aral @robryk Blocking access is #Cloudflare’s business. That’s what they do. They make access exclusive to only those who conform to CF’s policy & procedures, which discriminates against various technologies (technologies that work when CF is not in the loop). CF discriminates on the basis of IP address & browser. It also discriminates against people w/impairments by use of #CAPTCHA.
@koherecoWatchdog @aral @robryk I do not think this fight is one that is usefully linked to access to standards, when much more insurmountable access to standards issues, typically concerned with IP exist. That’s not to say that Cloudflare is to be ignored (I teach extensively about its power to my Internet law students). But it is not posing an empirical access to standards issue.
@koherecoWatchdog @mikarv @aral
```
$ host www.rfc-editor.org
www.rfc-editor.org has address 50.223.129.200
www.rfc-editor.org has IPv6 address 2001:559:c4c7::106
```
This doesn't seem to be behind cloudflare and seems to contain all ietf rfcs. I don't really understand the organisational structure there, but I don't see why www.ietf.org should be considered more canonical than this.
@robryk @aral @mikarv Are you saying GNAT users are not blocked on the basis that they have IPv6 addresses? My understanding of the problem is that GNAT users only have IPv4 and that those people are trapped on shared IPs. I’ve not been behind GNAT myself so I’ve not experienced the discrimination that they say impacts them.
@koherecoWatchdog @aral @mikarv
I'm saying that there's an obvious and even official way to get rfcs that doesn't involve cloudflare. I have no clue what does the www.rfc-editor.org website _itself_ do.
@robryk @mikarv @aral I’ve noticed that there is a non-CF path to RFCs, apparently unofficial. This is comparable to someone offering a mirror.. it’s lucky that www.rfc-editor.org exists. It’s like finding a back door of sorts. I found that site myself but I had to dig for it. It’s not clear of all those oppressed by Cloudflare would discover that alternative site.
@koherecoWatchdog @mikarv @aral
rfc-editor is the first search result for rfc3339 on google, ddg and second on bing. I don't think it's hard to find at all.
If you go to https://www.rfc-editor.org/about/, you will see that the entity that runs the site claims some amount of officiality. I already mentioned that in a previous comment.
I think that picking an example that it at best threadbare and at worst false is doing your goal a disservice: it casts doubt on any other statements that cloudflare is unavoidable.
This is my last message on this thread.
@robryk @aral @mikarv Hinging your claim that rfc-editor.org is universally discoverable by all people on the basis that Google & MS happened to give you a high result one day for one person is bizarre. Search engine rankings vary over time and by individual, especially that of surveillance advertizers. BTW, mentioning DDG is redundant w/Bing-- DDG outsources to Bing and Bing’s index is involved.
@mikarv @aral @robryk But I can say with certainty that as a Tor user, I face Cloudflare’s blockade & oppression daily. I’ve developed skills to some extent to circumvent CF blocks but it’s not absolute. I’m totally blocked in some cases. Sometimes the CAPTCHA fails to even render (though I admit I refuse to solve CAPTCHAs anyway).
@koherecoWatchdog @mikarv @aral
You said that it's hard to fetch RFCs without involving CloudFlare. I pointed out that it's not so. I don't get what are you trying to argue for anymore.
@robryk @koherecoWatchdog @mikarv @aral
I tried to interloan a New Zealand civil engineering standard recently and was told the standards holder refused to interloan, many standards are hundreds of $, while much of the research is taxpayer funded. 'Standards' are a rort.
@koherecoWatchdog @aral @robryk who exactly is it that cannot obtain a copy of an IETF standard?
@mikarv @robryk @aral Example: you live a poor region with cheap internet service. Your ISP cannot afford enough IPv4 addresses for all customers, so they deploy GNAT which entails shared IP addresses. Cloudflare is hostile toward GNAT address spaces because they are shared IPs (like Tor for example). People behind GNAT can still reach RFCs, but only incidentally b/c someone mirrored them.
@robryk @mikarv @aral The problem is that you have a standard that’s intended for the consumption & benefit of all people, and access to the standard is not universal but rather arbitrary & ad-hoc, dependant on some 3rd party volunteering to mirror & maintain the mirrored copy. RFC compliance is voluntary, so relies on people to be motivated which walled gardens diminish.