Please wait...
Oh.
Well sometimes you have to play with the pigs or people dont know you exist. Marketing.
Fri Oct 20 2023 13:25:59 EDT from nonservatorI didn't mean by defying the feds, I meant by not using Discord.
Totally decentralized! Uncensorable! Blockchain! Find us on Discord!
Yeah. The mainline sites should only be used as billboards to tell people how to log in to the non-mainline sites.
And the more oppressive the establishment gets, the more people will have to go "underground" to have anything resembling a free and democratized Internet.
But most people won't do that for as long as the Starbucks and iPhones keep coming. So it's easier to get started now; it'll be harder later; people will do it but it will be harder.
Or perhaps we shouldn't bother. Regular people ruined the clearnet when they flooded in in the 1990s.
lol does not get more ironic than this. I would love to be able to peek into the future to see if all this cancel stuff really removes history, or if we snap out of it at some point and say enough is enough.
"Progressives are now trying to cancel author George Orwell, according to an article published Sunday." -> https://dailycaller.com/2023/10/17/anna-funder-cancel-george-orwell-irony/
Wow. Just wow.
Presidential hopeless Nikki "George Bush with a vagina" Haley has promised to "force every person on social media" to be "verified by their name".
As your tireless sysop for the past 35 years, I promise you that if such a thing ever happened, I would gleefully tell Ms. Bush to go fuck herself.
Ya. I doubt it ever happens, but many in DC want this. ( and most politicos in the UK want, and of course china does it now ) They want to feed the data to the FBI, so when you say wrong things, you vanish.
Wed Nov 15 2023 14:16:45 EST from IGnatius T Foobar
Wow. Just wow.
Presidential hopeless Nikki "George Bush with a vagina" Haley has promised to "force every person on social media" to be "verified by their name".
As your tireless sysop for the past 35 years, I promise you that if such a thing ever happened, I would gleefully tell Ms. Bush to go fuck herself.
I guess i should have said i dont think DC will ever mandate it.
BUT they influence places like FB... so it may happen via backdoor, of course it will be optional. Just avoid those places.
2023-11-15 14:16 from IGnatius T Foobar
Wow. Just wow.
Presidential hopeless Nikki "George Bush with a vagina" Haley has
promised to "force every person on social media" to be "verified by
their name".
As your tireless sysop for the past 35 years, I promise you that if
such a thing ever happened, I would gleefully tell Ms. Bush to go fuck
herself.
There is already resistence forming against this crap.
There is a guy who operates an email service under domain horsefucker.org (among others) as a bit of joke with friends. THe service got into a blacklist allegedly because it is not a "serious publicly available service) or some similar shit. The operator'sresponse has been to open the service for open registration instead of just for friends.
Registrations opened on 22nd this month.
Now she is "walking it back" according to sarcastic news:
"“But no, you can have anonymous — I don’t mind anonymous American people having free speech, what I don’t like is anonymous Russians and Chinese and Iranians having free speech,” Haley added.
“Americans have a right to free speech, including having anonymous accounts on social media. What Nikki doesn’t support is letting the Chinese and Iranians create anonymous accounts to spread chaos and anti-American filth among our people,” Haley’s campaign said in a statement."
Sorry but no, everyone should believe in free speech for everyone, regardless of where they come from. Even if what they say, we disagree with. ( tho we have the right to ignore their stupid face too )
Wed Nov 15 2023 14:16:45 EST from IGnatius T Foobar
Wow. Just wow.
Presidential hopeless Nikki "George Bush with a vagina" Haley has promised to "force every person on social media" to be "verified by their name".
As your tireless sysop for the past 35 years, I promise you that if such a thing ever happened, I would gleefully tell Ms. Bush to go fuck herself.
Anonymous Free Speech for everykitty.
Anonymous Free Speech for nokitty.
These are mewtually exclusive.
i guess FCC just voted to accept absolute control over the US internet. One of many legislators speaking out, tho its too late:
"The Biden Administration’s entire approach to the Internet—its broadband agenda, if you will— can be boiled down to one word: control. You can see it with the Biden Administration’s call for Title II utility-style regulation of the Internet—a move that two of President Obama’s former Solicitors General described as an enormous and transformative expansion of the government’s authority over the Internet. You can see it in the Biden Administration’s campaign to pressure Internet companies into censoring Americans’ protected political speech—a coordinated effort that is now on appeal to the Supreme Court. And you can see it in the Biden Administration’s demand that the FCC adopt these “digital equity” rules today—a framework that gives the FCC a nearly limitless power to veto private sector decisions "
Sort of scary when even Obama staff thinks its out of line..
So let's talk about what the government can and can't do, what individual sites can and can't do, and the relationship between them.
For starters, let's give a shout out to Bob Cahn and Vint Cerf. Their idea of making the network itself a dumb pipe is what made the modern Internet possible in the first place. This wasn't the norm back then. Networks of the time had a lot of central controller nodes that did a lot more than even the most sophisticated routers do, and those would have been pinch points where the horrifyingly bad people could impose restrictions that aren't possible with the IP Internet.
Platforms that are fully controlled by the China/US government, such as TikTok, Facebook/Instagram, and Google, don't need to be externally manipulated at the network level because they do what the state tells them to do. X (nee Twitter) is a special case because they are allowing some amount of free speech (or as they call it on wikipedophilia, "white supremacy") but they have enough money and a big enough presence to push back. That leaves us with the question of how smaller sites survive.
Some of them simply go away. The ones that need money to survive are already on their way out. I have some inside information so I won't mention the site by name, but it's one you have probably heard of. Once X opened up the users disappeared and now they can't pay their bills.
Hosting is always going to be available *somewhere*. I have heard that if you want to avoid both the American and Chinese governments you can host your site in a place like Singapore where they don't really cave in to either one.
That leaves what I consider the most vulnerable piece: the Domain Name System.
There's no way around this one, at least not on the clearnet. If the state didn't like something they read on Uncensored they could shut it down tomorrow by seizing the domain, for example. (That's why I cloak the actual location of the servers.)
To truly protect yourself from the China/US government you'd have to use a domain in a country code that doesn't immediately cave to them (I hear Laos is nice this time of year) but if you are enough of a nuisance, the islamic terrorists who run ICANN will do the dirty work for them.
What does all this add up to? I am always reminded of the famous phrase from Star Wars -- "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." People don't rebel if it risks losing what little they have, but if squeezed until they have nothing left to lose, that's when things start to change. And that means there's a point after which people will actively look for ways around that tight control. It's happened before. Look at how much piracy there was in music and movies before they loosened up a little. The same will happen with free speech in general.
We still have some amount of free speech here in the open for now. So let me remind the world that Xi Jinping looks exactly like Winnie the Pooh.
Tho i do agree in principle ( no surprise there :) ) a couple of random comments.
Yes, centralized DNS is the biggest risk to the internet as we know it and i think one of the main flaws. Not that the founders could have ever foreseen what is now happening, but it was a flaw. I see it all the time in the IP Rights world. Whack-a-mole only works so long, and each time you switch, you tend to leave people behind. And sure there are a couple of distributed alternatives to bypass the entire thing, but they are not really quite ready for prime time, and so few know how to do that anyway, so DNS blocks are effective enough to get most. So in the end, 'they' win.
Along the same lines, hosting overseas works now, but if governments start blocking hosting services, or even entire countries.. Then you are back to having to run TOR/i2P/Freenet/etc. Then might as well run it at home since your audience just vanished as so few people know about this stuff, and getting 'the truth out' to the masses becomes impossible, and they win again. And of course as content is blocked, fewer people 'out of the loop' will get to learn about alternatives as that will be forbidden knowledge. Even if their whitewash only gets 95% of the world, they win. They know they cant stop it all, but if they can brainwash the majority, we lose.
As far as twitter, musk just announced hes blocking pro-Palestine accounts .. So much for free speech there. Sure i disagree with those people and they should rot 6 feet under ( or be used for animal feed, as i often say ), but as long as they are not organizing violence, or actively engaging, they get to wave their dumbass flag and speak too, and spout stupidity. Now, that said, i'm slowly starting to get to the point of not wanting to take the high road anymore, or be fair. Getting sick of these people, and starting to want to dish out what they give, which includes censorship, and violence. ( never thought i'd say that.. but its their fault ).
And speaking of free speech online. I'm really pissed off at FB today as they keep cutting my posts off. im considering again of putting out a small twitter like clone ( simple blog + login ). Not that i'm against putting anther full citadel out of course, even its back to invite-only, but have to be honest, if its not brain dead easy to use for the non-techie and since there is no 'magic phone app', most people i know wont bother. ( that was the first question of some, 'what is the app called' ) its unfortunate, but its just the reality of today's 'average user'. Attention span of a flea and skills not much better. ( last time i tried this and told everyone.. i had only a handful of takers from my group of fiends/family, and for most part it was too much for them, they needed it dumbed WAY down.. ). WE may love the thing, but they dont, which in my case is my main audience.. And of course as i consider this, i got DoSed again this morning due to script kiddies and got locked out of my nextcloud, via internet ( not internal of course as it only blocks the offending IP of the flood of failed logins, which as far as it knows, is my reverse proxy. )
Oh and not exactly related, but read today that they estimate nearly 75% of all internet traffic is attack attempts, DoS actions, or general fishing bots.. I remember when that would have been porn instead..
The Cock.li email service just made it to its 10th Anniversary and they are throwing a big party!
You are invited to join cock.li and get an email account with a stupid domain attached to it, such as the popular cock.li, cumallover.me, horsefucker.org and loves.dicksinmyan.us.
From the celebratory message:
<<<<
[...] There are great personal costs to running this place, but everything has just taught me why it needs to stick around, and why it should be open to everyone. In celebration of cock.li's birthday and its re-opening, I'd like to reflect back on some of the more positive influences cock.li has had over the last decade.
The first time I knew this place was being put to good use is when I got an e-mail from someone in a country known for their very restricted Internet. They were thankful to have easy access to uncensored e-mail as it allowed them to speak freely. Being able to open an e-mail account without connecting to other identity systems is a critical component of the free Internet, and I got to see why. Cock.li is blocked in multiple oppressive countries for this reason, but as of writing, not this one.
You don't need anything but an Internet connection to use cock.li. If all you had was a library card you could use a public computer to get an e-mail account. It's a strange thing to say about a joke website, but cock.li improves access to services for marginalized people globally, without connecting into some corporate system.
[...]I'm so grateful to have an outlet to express my values in the form of poorly-maintained online services. The like-minded people I've met along the way have developed into some of my closest friends, coworkers, and business partners. I'm so thankful to my friends for being there for me, I couldn't have made it this far without them. Thanks for keeping me level. For reminding me what's important. For keeping my mind on COCK.
<<<<<<
I am aware USAns are celebrating thanksgiving around this date, so thank you all who operate inedpendent services which serve as strongholds for Internet freedom!
"In a speech delivered by New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Monday, she revealed that the state is "collecting data" from social media "surveillance efforts" in order to combat "hate speech."
"We’re very focused on the data we’re collecting from surveillance efforts, what’s being said on social media platforms, and we have launched an effort to be able to counter some of the negativity and reach out to people when we see hate speech being spoken about on online platforms," said Hochul."
Come visit me B* and you will see what a no trespassing suit looks like, as i call my local PD to escort you off my property.
Guy gets arrested for recording video on private property. Media is screaming 'free speech rights violated'. No, you dont have that on private property. Really most of your rights vanish on private property. I'm sure they will next say 'it had public access' .. so? that is meaningless too.
While may have been doing it for a good cause, ( wont get into subject, not the point ) he wont win in court. He violated law ( trespassing for one, since its posted no recording, perhaps more )