Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 157 posts

Re: Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns

#61

Post by loudmax »

zmgsabst wrote: post #11
cyberlurker wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which emergency are you referring to? And what censorship methods are you referring to? For example, I think the media choosing not to cover a story immediately when it is being peddled by an unreliable political agent doesn’t qualify as censorship. Even if it turns out to be true.

COVID was the example I had I mind, where they censored medical professionals, politicians, and journalists who said lockdowns were a bad idea, questioned the data supporting mRNA (eg, Robert Malone), etc. But since you mentioned not covering a story — we also have the Hunter Biden laptop, which wasn’t merely not covered, but actively censored on social media during an election. (Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg admitted as…

Media companies are not the government, and they do not have a legal responsibility to promulgate all views. In the case where a majority of the medical community perceives that misinformation and disinformation is directly leading to people dying, media companies may feel they have a moral obligation to publish the scientific mainstream over the fringes.

The same goes for political coverage. Fox News is within their rights not to broadcast Senate hearings featuring multiple conservative Republicans alleging that Donald Trump attempted to overthrow the democratically elected government.

What Trump attempted on January 6th was treason against the United States. What Fox News promulgates is merely media content to sell advertising space.

Re: Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns

#62

Post by jliptzin »

clarkmoody wrote: post #53
jliptzin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Examples of such pressure from the government? Do you mean when Trump threatened to remove section 230 protection from social media companies because he didn't like "the way he was treated" on their sites? https://www.npr.org/2020/09/23/916096008/justice-department-...

FB censored the Hunter laptop story during the election at the behest of the FBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN3PIGLDscQ

That doesn't sound like pressure at all, that just sounds like a tip from the FBI that they could do whatever they want with. Furthermore, they didn't even ban the story anyway.

“Basically, the background here is the FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know you should be on high alert,’ ” said Zuckerberg. “ ‘We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that so just be vigilant.’ ”

"Facebook did not completely ban sharing of the article, but instead limited how much its algorithm automatically shared it to other people for a week, while third-party fact-checkers tried to verify the reporting."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532

https://nypost.com/2022/08/28/fbi-put-the-hunter-biden-story...

Re: Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns

#63

Post by tetromino_ »

cheschire wrote: post #42

I think they mean WWW shutdowns? Or are governments killing VOIP, newsgroups, email, etc? Somehow I doubt that governments are successful in completely shutting down a network of networks that is designed specifically to resist shutdown attacks from internal or external. Maybe I'm naive. edit: Maybe they're referring to the ability to order ISPs to kill access at the router level. So yeah maybe the concept of central…

It can mean government control over all IXPs in the country (including DPI hardware and a killswitch), and legal mandate for all ISPs in the country to use only government-controlled IXPs. So unless you have a satellite connection or a private microwave link to a friend's antenna on the other side of the border, you don't get internet.

Re: Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns

#64

Post by [deleted] »

cheschire wrote: post #42

I think they mean WWW shutdowns? Or are governments killing VOIP, newsgroups, email, etc? Somehow I doubt that governments are successful in completely shutting down a network of networks that is designed specifically to resist shutdown attacks from internal or external. Maybe I'm naive. edit: Maybe they're referring to the ability to order ISPs to kill access at the router level. So yeah maybe the concept of central…

[deleted]

Re: Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns

#65

Post by cyberlurker »

themoonisachees wrote: post #40
zmgsabst wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COVID was the example I had I mind, where they censored medical professionals, politicians, and journalists who said lockdowns were a bad idea, questioned the data supporting mRNA (eg, Robert Malone), etc. But since you mentioned not covering a story — we also have the Hunter Biden laptop, which wasn’t merely not covered, but actively censored on social media during an election. (Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg admitted as…

Alright i'll humor you: what proves the hunter biden laptop story? Last I checked some guy said he had it, and that it had damning evidence on it, but for some reason refused to produce said evidence, or any evidence that the laptop was bidens or that there was a laptop at all. You'd think if the contents of said laptop were as damning as they were purported to be, they would be all over, yet the guy who supposedly h…

I say this as someone who still thinks it is overblown and fair that the social networks didn't let it get amplified as a distraction right before the election. (It was being pushed by people who trafficked in all kinds of misinformation)

It did come out, it was real, and had real emails from Hunter being a total idiot trying to use his Dad to make connections and get paid. It also had nudes and drug use and other embarrassing dumb shit.

It is just a distraction though. Everyone knows Hunter has problems and it had nothing to harm Biden’s character if you are an independent third party looking at the evidence.

So… this bugs me when it becomes the rally point for “censorship”. Give me a break.

Re: Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns

#66

Post by curtainsforus »

Claude_Shannon wrote: post #26
zmgsabst wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments which claim to support values like freedom of speech, but in fact do not. Eg, the US — who is outspoken on that issue, but during an emergency used social media companies to censor doctors, politicians, etc who did not agree with them.

You have freedom to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre. Just as you have freedom to pay for the consequences of that.

That metaphor was originally used to justify criminalizing protesting wars.

Re: Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns

#67

Post by jliptzin »

fein wrote: post #52
jliptzin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media != the government

The FBI (government) told Facebook (private company) to censor things that aren't illegal, and they did. In this case, social media === government for all intents and purposes.

“Basically, the background here is the FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know you should be on high alert,’ ” said Zuckerberg. “ ‘We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that so just be vigilant.’ ”

"Facebook did not completely ban sharing of the article, but instead limited how much its algorithm automatically shared it to other people for a week, while third-party fact-checkers tried to verify the reporting."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532

https://nypost.com/2022/08/28/fbi-put-the-hunter-biden-story...

Re: Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns

#68

Post by cyberlurker »

zmgsabst wrote: post #15
cyberlurker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They passed laws making those social media companies censor them?

They had officials coordinate with social media companies to coordinate takedowns of accounts and messages which disagreed with them.

So, public health officials asked social media companies to stop accounts from spamming that vaccines cause autism?

There was no law and no threat, just public and private coordination.

I have no problem with that. Sorry, this is not even close to censorship.

Re: Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns

#69

Post by robryk »

hotpotamus wrote: post #59
robryk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all your endpoints are at least somewhat under your control (i.e. the thing doesn't need to be accessible via a web browser on a vanilla computer) you can reduce "exploits" to "exploits of my implementation of TLS/my VPN of choice" plus the bootstrap issue. If the endpoints are not under your control to that extent, then I'd argue that "all the residential ISPs in US" is just as bad as "all of China/Russia" due to…

I'm not sure what you mean by implementation of TLS. It's just standard Java TLS libraries, though of course we can be pretty strict about which ciphers are in use - we do control the client to that extent and are typically pretty good about keeping on top of that at least.

If you require client certificates then you don't need to worry about non-insider attacks on anything other than your TLS library and your client cert bootstrap procedure.

Re: Flicking the kill switch: governments embrace internet shutdowns

#70

Post by mixcocam »

generalizations wrote: post #3

Time to start building long distance (100+ mile) mesh nets. Alternately, I wonder if there's any way to lay down fiber long distance that doesn't require govt authorization...and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

This has already been done at scale in Europe.

https://guifi.net/en

Post reply on HN