Props to Josh at kiwifarms for giving 0 fucks.

submitted by useless_aether from i.imgtc.com

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[–]HurricaneHank 22 insightful - 1 fun22 insightful - 0 fun23 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

I have no clue who this guy is, or anything about his site, but one danger is that if you give them the finger, they can go after your upstream.

We've seen that before, and there's more and more pressure on the upstream providers to shut off "noncompliant" sites. Then you have, at least, a headache. There's pressure on DNS too, to stop resolving addresses, and most people won't know how get there with a raw IP address.

I can't say if any of that will happen here and it might not, but it wouldn't surprise me too much either.

Also, IP blocks. True, you can get around those if you know how, but most people don't know how, so in practice they are fairly effective. Next is the ban on VPN and VPS address blocks, as China has started doing, to make it harder to circumvent the national firewalls.

I feel it's inevitable that we are going to see more and more balkanization of the internet over events like this.

[–]AschTheConjurer 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

All those tech risks are certainly viable, but as he says in the email, our country doesn't have any clout or political power to properly censor it all without outside assistance.

Moreover, they can't really prevent the new zealand public from looking for it, because we don't own any of our internet infrastructure. It's all on loan from Spark/Telecom, so it'd be up to Telecom to fuck with Kiwi Farms upstream

EDIT: Welp, I guess outside assistance was what they got, now that the social networks have basically doxxed anyone who shared that video to our police. We thought Article 13 would kill edgy memes, but the NZP beat them to it.

[–]HurricaneHank 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Welp, I guess outside assistance was what they got

Ugh :-( Yah... these days there seems to be a lot of cooperation between the countries doing this, who all want broadly the same kind of censorship powers over the net. They can request that the other ones help them. I'm sure they got a lot of help from the USA, and maybe the EU too.

The problem of course, is that people who are NOT extremists, racists, alt-right or alt-left, but just normal everyday people who dislike censorship, we get pushed into the fringes too and then it's easy to lump us together with the kind of extremist elements who go shoot up mosques. We get branded with the same iron, whether we deserve it or not, simply because of the encroachment of society-wide censorship of the normal social spaces.

[–]AschTheConjurer 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

New Zealand's GCSB and cyber intelligence departments are functions of the Five Eyes network, so unfortunately our infrastructure has been complicit in finding things to censor in all manner of other countries.

Speaking of censorship of the net, I've tried having a look into a couple websites I've seen mentioned here, namely BitChute and ZeroHedge, and both of those sites are "forcibly closing" connections.

Are they only accessible through VPNs or through an onion browser normally, something along those lines? Or is there something suspicious going on here?

EDIT: Also, yes, New Zealand's generally individualistic form of politics doesn't mesh well with the Americanized left-right black-white outlook. When we disagree on things politically, people become each other's enemies almost instantly. Case in point, I commented on an announcement about stricter gun laws here in NZ, saying relaxing our incredibly paralytic self-defense laws would probably be better, and someone almost immediately got carried away with the 'cuckservative gun-fucking cunt you deserve to die' stuff you hear enraged NPCs saying.

Never mind that I volunteered at the SPCA, or as a counsellor for youths, I present lectures to businesses in favour of Soc-Dem style labour rights and fostering a sense of local community in a world where the internet has globalized us and made us disconnected, or that I've heavily criticized a lot of censorship and authoritarian actions in other countries before now, and am an advocate for medical drugs -- no, because I like guns I must therefore be one of the strawman alt-right people that this person has been taught to hate on reflex.

[–]HurricaneHank 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I must therefore be one of the strawman alt-right people that this person has been taught to hate on reflex.

Yeah, that strawman effect is becoming dangerous to our societies, IMO. We all need to become more willing to engage with people who are different from us, and learn they are (mostly) decent and kind people too. Internet echo-chambers are creating animosity where people would otherwise be getting along just fine. There are always going to be disagreements and differences of opinion, but they don't have to turn into that kind of ugly "reflex hate" that you got the bad end of.