*UPDATED* Microsoft's Brad Smith Calls For A "Digital Geneva Convention"

[Colonel_Gerdauf]

4 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

To be honest, I just want a universal internal bill of human rights.

The thing is, are you willing to write 50 thousand pages for such a document? There is simply no way to make it "simple"; you need to accommodate for some political and cultural differences (otherwise nobody will even bother enforcing it), as well as deal with all the loopholes that people have and will come up with to circumvent and bypass it. Granted, there are many things that are considered acceptable elsewhere when they have no justification for it, but they more often than not tie in with more deeply rooted values, and simply changing these without forethought will end in either a bitter calamity, or the creation of an echo chamber (which then leads to unrest).

 

4 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

freedom of speech, no spying without a warrant from an actual judge, a clear understanding that an IP address does not equate to a person, no preventing the use of adblock (for security purposes)

To drive my point home, if I was an evil and selfish business, it only takes me less that ten seconds to find a backdoor to the ruling as you wrote it. The first statement is potentially dangerous for very obvious reasons, forged documents can deal with the second, the third is too vague to be of any substance, and recent history has proven the fourth to be completely worthless.

[laminutederire]

23 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

To be honest, I just want a universal internal bill of human rights.

 

freedom of speech, no spying without a warrant from an actual judge, a clear understanding that an IP address does not equate to a person, no preventing the use of adblock (for security purposes)

To be fair, human rights already are supposed to prevent them from doing most of that.

This is the new torture of modern times with the constant spying to the point you basically never feel not being spied on no matter how careful you are.

But it is also the new slavery, in the sense that it is sheer exploitation of humans without any consent on people's part. 

Both of these are banned by human rights but remain present because the reality can be twisted to make it look good, or at least good enough.

 

But those points aren't what that guy from Microsoft want to eradicate. He just want to protect companies, and to do that he has to give some benefits to the customers.

[laminutederire]

18 hours ago, Colonel_Gerdauf said:

The thing is, are you willing to write 50 thousand pages for such a document? There is simply no way to make it "simple"; you need to accommodate for some political and cultural differences (otherwise nobody will even bother enforcing it), as well as deal with all the loopholes that people have and will come up with to circumvent and bypass it. Granted, there are many things that are considered acceptable elsewhere when they have no justification for it, but they more often than not tie in with more deeply rooted values, and simply changing these without forethought will end in either a bitter calamity, or the creation of an echo chamber (which then leads to unrest).

 

To drive my point home, if I was an evil and selfish business, it only takes me less that ten seconds to find a backdoor to the ruling as you wrote it. The first statement is potentially dangerous for very obvious reasons, forged documents can deal with the second, the third is too vague to be of any substance, and recent history has proven the fourth to be completely worthless.

The thing is with those documents is that there aren't that much loopholes.

Loopholes are based on the idea that the rules have to be followed to the letter, while such conventions want to build the foundation of a common ground we agree on, which will give the logic on which to judge one's acts. It's more about morality than law. Because of that it is harder to enforce,  but it is even harder to find loopholes.

It is like rules in the playground. They're not set in stone, but if you relentlessly break them of purposefully go against the moral rules of it and you are basically left to be playing alone for quite a while.

Here it's the same except sanctions are for instance "OK China you want to copy intellectual property ? Then we'll leave you in your corner of the world and just ignore you and stop funding you because you're too unreliable to deal with"

[Colonel_Gerdauf]

4 hours ago, laminutederire said:

The thing is with those documents is that there aren't that much loopholes.

Loopholes are based on the idea that the rules have to be followed to the letter, while such conventions want to build the foundation of a common ground we agree on, which will give the logic on which to judge one's acts. It's more about morality than law. Because of that it is harder to enforce,  but it is even harder to find loopholes.

It is like rules in the playground. They're not set in stone, but if you relentlessly break them of purposefully go against the moral rules of it and you are basically left to be playing alone for quite a while.

Here it's the same except sanctions are for instance "OK China you want to copy intellectual property ? Then we'll leave you in your corner of the world and just ignore you and stop funding you because you're too unreliable to deal with"

With all due respect, I do not agree with the analogy you are using.

While you can easily send a message in the context of the playground, the geopolitical world is where the situation can get very nasty, and it is no laughing matter. People in political circles tend to have the "my way or the highway" mentality in how things are supposed to be done. When their personal interests are on the line, they will do anything in their power to limit outside interference (hence the loopholes and backdoors). In that situation, most penalties will not affect them, and those that do will be used as weapons against the nations or people enforcing them. We already have many nations (such as Iran and Mainland China) whose citizens have been conditioned not to take "fancy paper" legal documentation seriously. The more you punish Chinese piracy, the more you encourage it. The more you punish the Iranian use of nuclear technology, the more secretive they will be about it. These are just two examples of the exercise in futility that are notable.

 

When a lot of room for interpretation is left by these documents, there will always be someone out there to take advantage of it. As the old saying goes: "you give them an inch, they take a mile". That does not just make it harder to enforce, but it becomes outright impossible. At the end of the day, abstract rules do not work in politics. Case in point: nobody can agree on what is written on the American Constitution.

[Guest Kloaked]

Added video to the speech from last week.

[Delicieuxz]

They need to also add that a person's system's generated data is their own property, and no company is entitled to receiving it. And that any data-sharing must be overtly opt-in, and any efforts by companies who do take people's system-generated data as if it were theirs to take are engaging in data-theft, and cyber crime.