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

Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

infosec.exchange

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 386 posts

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#61

Post by atoav »

lrgart wrote: post #35
masklinn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, just as likely, mastodon users are elon critics and thus hurt his feelings, which is a bannable offense. Thus mastodon cross-posting and reposting is a proxy for bannable offenses, and therefore a bannable offense.

Quoted post unavailable.

> If they had merely done what Musk does now

If they had merely done what Musk CLAIMS he does. But what he claims is not what he actually does do.

That flight tracker he banned is based on publicly available information that everybody can legally access, at the same time he posts someones license plate for weird paranoid reasons. How can he be against doxing when he does it himself with people other than himself?

> there is certainly way more speech now than before

Speech does not get more free, when there is more of it. Speech replaces other speech. There are certain things you can say on a anonymous image board you cannot say anywhere else. But there are also certain discourse you can have in other places that would not be possible elsewhere.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#62

Post by 0ct4via »

paulgb wrote: post #41
Geee wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

They are using that for cover, but the block goes far beyond that content. I have an account on a smallish, niche community Mastodon instance which is closed to sign-ups. I can’t tweet or DM a message containing a link to my account there. My guess is that Elon has wanted to squash Mastodon for a while, and the ElonJet episode gave him an excuse.

Email address spam evasion techniques work. Replacing '.' with ' . ' or [.] or [dot] all work.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#63

Post by bboygravity »

lrgart wrote: post #35
masklinn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, just as likely, mastodon users are elon critics and thus hurt his feelings, which is a bannable offense. Thus mastodon cross-posting and reposting is a proxy for bannable offenses, and therefore a bannable offense.

Quoted post unavailable.

> While Musk can no longer claim to be a free speech absolutist,

What are the arguments for this??

Is it because he's blocking live trackers (from Mastodon or otherwise) for his airplane while he's an active target for political assasination or is there like.. an actual good reason/example for this statement?

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#64

Post by vidarh »

lukeschlather wrote: post #50
codeflo wrote: post #39

I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates…

> you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person. I've only used Twitter a handful of times and don't really like the medium, but it's really not that hard to run a server. And I don't think there…

There are also paid hosting services, and more are sure to come.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#65

Post by _djo_ »

waihtis wrote: post #28

Quoted post unavailable.

Like any distributed service, 'Mastodon' will have bad and illegal stuff on some server somewhere. However those instances will be blocked and defederated by any mainstream instance.

Using that as an excuse is like trying to justify banning access to the entire internet because of bad websites.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#66

Post by whitepaint »

codeflo wrote: post #39

I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates…

You can export your data and move it to another server. If you're banned on Twitter, you're done.

Also, complete failures like banning important stories, banning presidents, banning journalists etc. cannot happen on Mastodon the same way that it has happened countless of times on Twitter and will continue happening.

Mastodon is obviously superior when it comes to the freedom of speech. Elon is afraid, because he knows. Funnily enough, he is the reason why we will get the better version of social media faster.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#67

Post by richbell »

bboygravity wrote: post #63
lrgart wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> While Musk can no longer claim to be a free speech absolutist, What are the arguments for this?? Is it because he's blocking live trackers (from Mastodon or otherwise) for his airplane while he's an active target for political assasination or is there like.. an actual good reason/example for this statement?

> for his airplane while he's an active target for political assasination

Are you talking about the alleged incident that demonstrably had no connection to his jet tracker, and was so scary he didn't file a police report?

> an actual good reason/example for this statement?

How about him banning journalists for merely reporting the news and falsely claiming they doxed his address? Or him acting like a big baby and blocking anyone who doesn't stroke his ego?

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#68

Post by snvzz »

vidarh wrote: post #47
jojobas wrote: post #21

> Twitter's anti-Mastodon filtering is clown shoes amateur hour. I'd think it will be effective for 90%+ of people trying to link to where they're leaving. This evasion manual will not be seen or understood by an average user.

From what I've seen, it seems to have had the opposite effect. People have gotten creative and far more have spoken about it.

Loud minority.

The average user's exposure to any of that is minimum, and they're not about to abandon their twitter clout for some unknown platform.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#69

Post by _djo_ »

bboygravity wrote: post #63
lrgart wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> While Musk can no longer claim to be a free speech absolutist, What are the arguments for this?? Is it because he's blocking live trackers (from Mastodon or otherwise) for his airplane while he's an active target for political assasination or is there like.. an actual good reason/example for this statement?

Every other notable person who is genuinely at risk of political assassination implements actually useful methods to prevent it, such as using good opsec, having a solid security team, not flying on the same three private jets everywhere, not travelling in rare and easily identifiable vehicles like prototype Cybertrucks, and not revealing their own location through tweets. There are companies that specialise in helping with all of this as a service, including booking charters, hotels, and other tickets through difficult-to-trace intermediaries. They also work closely with law enforcement.

Musk has not been carrying out any of the practices of someone worried about assassination, and the idea that @ElonJet did anything to increase the risk of him or his family being attacked is ludicrous. The account wasn't even active at the time of the alleged attack on his child.

The extent to which people will defend the baseless claims of Musk just because of who he is blows my mind.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#70

Post by sandworm101 »

bboygravity wrote: post #63
lrgart wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> While Musk can no longer claim to be a free speech absolutist, What are the arguments for this?? Is it because he's blocking live trackers (from Mastodon or otherwise) for his airplane while he's an active target for political assasination or is there like.. an actual good reason/example for this statement?

He can simple hire/fly in someone else's plane. This isnt a tracker on him. It is a tracker on his own vanity.
Post reply on HN