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Props to Josh at kiwifarms for giving 0 fucks. by useless_aether in censorship

[–]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.

Props to Josh at kiwifarms for giving 0 fucks. by useless_aether in censorship

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

New Zealand has gone full police state. They are threatening up to TEN years in prison for even having the video saved on your computer. by useless_aether in WorldNews

[–]HurricaneHank 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I meant in the general sense of China heavily censoring the internet their citizens can see, and using things like the "Social Credit System" to punish bad behavior. They have a "Great Firewall" which they use to block off sites the party does not want people seeing, and that includes some really major things like wikipedia. It used to be easy to get around the blocks with a VPN, but now they're blocking VPNs too, and apparently using deep packet inspection. Not to mention, if you do this too much, your life may become uncomfortable.

Here's a few links if you are interested in how China is dealing with the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China

https://www.nytimes.com/topic/destination/internet-censorship-in-china

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17059916/china-censors-social-media-responses-abolish-presidential-terms

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/china-has-found-64-tiananman-related-terms-to-block-on-its-internet-today/372137/

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170330/04094837040/use-vpns-banned-completely-millions-people-chinese-authorities.shtml

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion

Warning: WaPo's site is cancer since the new EU regulations went into effect. I don't know if this link is still functional, but ->

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-scary-lesson-to-the-world-censoring-the-internet-works/2016/05/23/413afe78-fff3-11e5-8bb1-f124a43f84dc_story.html

Those are only the barest beginning! A little searching will turn up much more info. Over the last few years they are starting to wield an iron fist over what Chinese people are allowed to see, do, and say online. They've gone full Orwell.

Props to Josh at kiwifarms for giving 0 fucks. by useless_aether in censorship

[–]HurricaneHank 22 insightful - 1 fun22 insightful - 0 fun23 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 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.

New Zealand has gone full police state. They are threatening up to TEN years in prison for even having the video saved on your computer. by useless_aether in WorldNews

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

Agreed, that's part of what he said he was after. And the internet censors are playing right into his hand.

New Zealand has gone full police state. They are threatening up to TEN years in prison for even having the video saved on your computer. by useless_aether in WorldNews

[–]HurricaneHank 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Ha :) So far I've managed to escape ever seeing that! You have a good point though: it's not a good situation if people don't even have a chance to avoid content they'd rather not see. IMHO, it should be a function of both the culture of the area they are in (the site, the group on that site) and also up to the person themselves. It's nasty to see some shock content on a group about Python programming. (Unless you think Python IS shock content...) Still, this widespread scrubbing of content from the internet is disturbing. It is the Chinese model metastasizing into the rest of the net.

New Zealand has gone full police state. They are threatening up to TEN years in prison for even having the video saved on your computer. by useless_aether in WorldNews

[–]HurricaneHank 32 insightful - 1 fun32 insightful - 0 fun33 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

This heavy censorship is really distressing. It seems to be taking over the whole internet these days.

I don't believe there's some dark conspiracy behind this event, at least not more than basic human nature. I think these events are merely a convenient excuse for what almost every government has been wanting for a long time: to have increased control over the internet. China is leading the way, but western governments want a piece of that action too.

The internet was a wild west not long ago: anything went. If you didn't want to see something, that's great... just don't look. But there is a strong desire to get that horse back into the barn. That personal freedom ethos is under severe pressure now from multiple fronts. I can't even put all the blame at the feet of governments, because they are acting under pressure from their constituents to "clean up the web" and "make it safe". Then you have even more who demand the removal of anything which offends them.

This event is a tragedy on two fronts, IMO. First, because 50 innocent people were killed in cold blood by some racist shit, and second, because of the collateral damage it's doing to online freedom.