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Staying ahead of censors in 2025

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Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#71

Post by curtisblaine »

thrance wrote: post #63
throwfaraway135 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it is really difficult to define what hate speech is, and more often than not it's used as a cudgel to silence the opposition. For Iran and Russia, it is what Khamenei and Putin don't want to hear, in the UK it's what Starmer doesn't want to hear.

Just read the damn law before spouting nonsense. There have been hate speech laws since the 1980s. There are simply just more and more insane neonazis groyper-types online to which it is applicable.

I don't think groyper speech is (or should be) automatically banned, though. It's a point of view that many find abhorrent, but it should be possible to express it. Same for far left messages encouraging the public to "eat the rich".

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#72

Post by tuetuopay »

keepamovin wrote: post #5

Legal question for the Tor team (disclaimer, I love Tor and use it in BrowserBox): - Does Tor need an OFAC license to supply to Russian and Iranian (and other sanctioned entities)? What's your approach to stay compliant and globally helpful? I know 50% of your funding comes from US government (or did a few years back, still?), does this give you extra pathways to engage those regions? I'm wondering because the system…

This sounds a bit like the GrapheneOS shenanigans in France recently: it's an opensource project with no product per-se. There's no supplying to anyone; rather people help themselves to grab it. The debate would be should opensource projects like Tor or GrapheneOS prevent sanctioned people from grabbing the freely (as in both beer and speech) available project from the shelf.

(writing this message, I realized how hard it is not to write "product" for the thing graphene and tor make)

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#73

Post by mos87 »

kgeist wrote: post #56
Fiveplus wrote: post #11

The section on conjure is fascinating. For those who haven't followed the refraction networking space, the idea of leveraging unused address space at the ISP level is something academic papers have proposed for years [1]. Seeing it deployed in the wild is huge. The hardest part of this has always been non-technical by the way. Convincing ISPs to cooperate. If the Tor project has managed to get ISPs to route traffic d…

>It completely breaks the censor's standard playbook of IP enumeration. You can't just block a specific subnet without risking blocking future legitimate allocations At least in Russia, they don't really care about collateral damage. Currently, without a VPN, I can't open like 30-50% links on Hacker News (mostly collateral damage after they banned large portions of IPs)

It's just half the Internet now after the late October blockage

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#74

Post by teiferer »

throwfaraway135 wrote: post #38
teiferer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more often than not Do you have any evidence for that claim or is it a gut feeling? > in the UK it's what Starmer doesn't want to hear. In a literal sense that can't be true, since upon change of government, the hate speech definition does not suddenly change. In contrast, Putin and Khamenei are very literally able to personally define the definition. In a figurative sense, that's likely true. As a democratically e…

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/04/grooming-gangs-s...

So, use that information at the next election. If enough people care then it changes outcomes.

Again, try that with Putin or Khamenei. (If such an article even gets published instead of ending the career or life of the journalist.)

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#75

Post by phkx »

phkx wrote: post #62
throwfaraway135 wrote: post #17

Considering the staggering number of arrest for online/offensive communications in England & Wales, we should add Britain to the list of Russia and Iran 2017: ~5,500 arrests 2019: ~7,734 arrests 2023: ~12,183 arrests

Maybe [the UK is not on the list] because this article focuses on technical aspects of overcoming blocking of the global internet in those countries that benefit from improvements to the TOR infrastructure. Maybe there are no problems circumventing DNS-level blocking with TOR in the countries which you mentioned. Maybe those people arrested (source?) were actually able to technically access the platforms on which the…

Looking into the situation in the UK specifically, I found a description of the potentially underlying issues [1] and those are indeed worrisome. I still fail to see why one would raise it in the way GP did to comment on the TOR post.

Others have pointed at the funding of TOR through the US. If there is actual evidence that this impacts the stated purpose of TOR (non-discriminating access to the internet, I‘d say), please share. Otherwise, my impression is still that TOR works as advertised and is working on solutions where it is not.

[1]: https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police...

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#76

Post by thrance »

curtisblaine wrote: post #71
thrance wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just read the damn law before spouting nonsense. There have been hate speech laws since the 1980s. There are simply just more and more insane neonazis groyper-types online to which it is applicable.

I don't think groyper speech is (or should be) automatically banned, though. It's a point of view that many find abhorrent, but it should be possible to express it. Same for far left messages encouraging the public to "eat the rich".

Please do not equate demands for more taxations with calls to do more genocides of jewish people. The far right is uniquely problematic in our modern political landscape.

And I disagree, free speech is a liberal value, you don't get to say nazi shit and hide behind free speech. Being a groyper is not a crime, but calling for genocide is and should be punished. Else we run the risk of normalizing these abhorrent ideas and repeating the worst times of our history, like the US seems on a course to doing.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#77

Post by ben_w »

vscode-rest wrote: post #44
danielbln wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad looks haven't really been a deterrent to much of anything in US politics for a while.

You misunderstand the game. It’s all about who considers what a bad look.

Yes, but in this context the US is very much putting European allies on various relevant naughty lists, in the name of "free speech" but unfortunately it does need the air-quotes.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#78

Post by grumbel »

Why is Tor making it so difficult to change the region/ExitNode then? Geo-Blocking is by far the most prevalent form of online censorship and while Tor can work around it, it requires fiddling with config files and restarting the service instead of clicking a button.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#80

Post by Defletter »

thinkingemote wrote: post #47
Defletter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that it is really difficult to define what hate speech is It can be, but free speech types like to pretend it's nigh impossible. The UK has had modern hate-speech laws (for want of a better term) since the Public Order Act 1986, which made it an offence to stir up or incite racial hatred. Amendments in 2006 and 2008 expanded that to religious and homophobic hatred respectively. This exists in stark c…

In the UK the arrests are mostly about "grossly offensive" speech. That's more of a grey area than the clearly defined hate speech. Often there are arrests and investigations but convictions on these are less. Convictions of hate speech also occur but are not news worthy and no one objects. The two different offenses are being confused and so it becomes news. In the US they don't have the grossly offensive category.…

Yeaaaah, the Communications Act 2003 is not fit for purpose in the modern information age where [seemingly] the vast majority of conversation is taking place in digital spaces. Sidenote, I do think it's amusing how, prior to the Online Safety Act 2023, it was an offence to Cunningham's Law someone (posting a knowingly-false statement online to annoy someone into correcting you). That said, I'm more or less ambivalent about "grossly offensive" speech: most of the examples I find people moaning about are people being gratuitously abhorrent and should have known better. But again, there are examples of police and prosecutors getting it wrong.

But I think the leap from acknowledging that to "speech should never be infringed", as many freeze peachers would advocate, to be infinitely more destructive: just see what it's doing to America. Just look at what the infiltration of American-style freedom of speech principles is doing to this country: we have people defending Lucy Connolly, the woman who publicly advocated for the burning down of hotels housing asylum seekers, calling her a "political prisoner", that the government is "silencing the right".

One part where I agree with you is "From the river to the sea": there are two versions of this (more than two, but they are variations of the same thing), the first being "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", and the other "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty". Guess which one our government finds objectionable. And guess which one is being used to justify a genocide. It does bother me that the government can chill and punish speech that objects to its foreign policy. But I feel as if (this is just vibes, feel free to correct me) the most harm being done is through anti-protest laws, not grossly offensive digital communications: I personally know of multiple people who regularly post abrasive, if not downright virulent "silence is violence" type content online, but do not go to protests because they fear arrest, detention, and being fired.

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