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The Free Internet Project

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11–20 of 66 posts

Re: The Free Internet Project

#11
post #5

This is interesting. Allow me to provide some counterpoints to the bullet points listed for a few (major) countries. China: * The Great Firewall of China blocks people's access to many websites, e.g., Facebook, Google. * Government engages in extensive censorship especially related to political organizing or protests. * Foreign social media apps are banned. Users must use real names on social media. The Great Firewal…

>As of this year Putin is now requiring bloggers to register if they have a certain number of readers, so that his administration can curtail international misinformation.

Yeah, totally, and not because the massive protests in late 2011-early 2012 were partly organized by a blogger/activist. Some of these attempts at what you call "preventing NSA/other evil foreign agency collecting our citizen's data" are more like "let's prevent them from using Facebook/Google/etc., force them to switch to our networks where we can happily get the data ourselves". Which is probably what's going to happen here in Russia in 2016.

Re: The Free Internet Project

#13
post #3

Never knew that the Netherlands and Brazil are the only countries in the world that have net neutrality as a law. Like with legal euthanasia, drugs, gay marriage, etc., as a Dutchman I'm amazed at how non-liberal much of the world is.

"Personal data protected"? So it is protected while our government stores it for 6 to 12 months?

Re: The Free Internet Project

#16
post #5

This is interesting. Allow me to provide some counterpoints to the bullet points listed for a few (major) countries. China: * The Great Firewall of China blocks people's access to many websites, e.g., Facebook, Google. * Government engages in extensive censorship especially related to political organizing or protests. * Foreign social media apps are banned. Users must use real names on social media. The Great Firewal…

I don't think what you provided are counterpoints, they're facts in support of the point.

Censorship in the name of preventing "foreign interference" is no less censorship.

Re: The Free Internet Project

#17
post #5

This is interesting. Allow me to provide some counterpoints to the bullet points listed for a few (major) countries. China: * The Great Firewall of China blocks people's access to many websites, e.g., Facebook, Google. * Government engages in extensive censorship especially related to political organizing or protests. * Foreign social media apps are banned. Users must use real names on social media. The Great Firewal…

>>>> Just this past year the CIA (under USAID) pretended to be a grassroots movement on Twitter served 'news' critical of the Cuban regime that nearly caused a Cuban uprising.

Is this a bad thing?

This is just one of the double standards I see people touting. They want every country to enjoy all the freedoms we have and none of the oppressive regimes these people live under. Yet these same people are highly critical of American efforts to help get those same people to start fighting against some of these countries holding them down.

These ideas never made sense to me:

People living under dictators and oppressive regimes is bad. Developers helping these people circumvent the technology that holds them down is good.

America government helping people start revolutions, spread information about how bad their government is and fight back is a bad thing. People creating technology to avoid the NSA and CIA snooping is good thing.

I guess it just depends on who's OX is being gored.

Re: The Free Internet Project

#18
post #5

This is interesting. Allow me to provide some counterpoints to the bullet points listed for a few (major) countries. China: * The Great Firewall of China blocks people's access to many websites, e.g., Facebook, Google. * Government engages in extensive censorship especially related to political organizing or protests. * Foreign social media apps are banned. Users must use real names on social media. The Great Firewal…

>>>> Just this past year the CIA (under USAID) pretended to be a grassroots movement on Twitter served 'news' critical of the Cuban regime that nearly caused a Cuban uprising. Is this a bad thing? This is just one of the double standards I see people touting. They want every country to enjoy all the freedoms we have and none of the oppressive regimes these people live under. Yet these same people are highly critical…

I'm not passing moral judgement or making normative claims about goodness or the badness, etc. What I am doing is explaining the incentives that these countries are responding to - showing you not just where the actors are but how the stage is set up. Policy does not exist in a vacuum.

Re: The Free Internet Project

#19

Sorry if this is off topic, but I wonder how many people typically donate when they see a "donate" button on a website. I imagine it's very small if any at all. Am I wrong?

I don't have a donate button, but I made some Bitcoin addresses specifically for donations and spread them around forum signatures, link in my GitHub page, etc.

One random day I was syncing my blockchain and noticed a ~$10 donation. Made me really happy :)

Unfortunately I'm not even sure what triggered it, but I probably helped someone on an internet forum and he wanted to give back. Thanks, random stranger!

So, to sum it up, according to my experience the total amount of donations on the internet is >= $10.

Re: The Free Internet Project

#20
post #5

This is interesting. Allow me to provide some counterpoints to the bullet points listed for a few (major) countries. China: * The Great Firewall of China blocks people's access to many websites, e.g., Facebook, Google. * Government engages in extensive censorship especially related to political organizing or protests. * Foreign social media apps are banned. Users must use real names on social media. The Great Firewal…

>China does not want its citizens' informations in America's XKeyScore nor it's citizens Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, etc data in America's PRISM. The is a laughable justification. If you actually believe in freedom of information you cannot condone China's policy, no matter how much you dislike America.

Nope, just providing some information to contextualize policy decisions by various countries.

Who said I'm justifying China's policy, or what I "dislike America"?

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