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US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

reuters.com

111–120 of 1001 posts

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#111
post #64

Sad that western Europe is pushing so hard for limits to free speech & privacy. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless.

What limits? You can do pretty much what you want but make sure you can defend yourself in the court. I feel there is a bit of a disconnect in terms where people get the news where in US you kind of expect biggest news providers to be biassed, eg Fox, hence reliance on social media. In Europe gov media is quite strong and objective, and the idea that it restricts something is odd. A great example is the banning of RT, they lost licenses IMO in multiple countries, but the agency was spreading a lot of lies. IMO what we all want is objective news reporting.

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#112
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing stops them from hosting it on fbi.gov, state.gov, etc. It's one thing to block some random .gov site unused for anything else, it's another thing to block a domain used for, say, filing flight plans.

Nit: If you're filing a flight plan, you do it with the country you're departing from. Even if you're piloting an aircraft departing into the US, it wouldn't have any effect on operations if you couldn't reach US websites. There's also several alternative ways for pilots to file flight plans outside of the web. (The flight plans get passed between countries via AFTN/AMHS, which are dedicated telecommunications networ…

I thought airlines still had to file passenger manifests with CBP separately, no?

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#113
post #83
post #64

Sad that western Europe is pushing so hard for limits to free speech & privacy. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless.

It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that. We know, we had the Nazis. Seems the US still has to learn a lesson or two, considering the current political situation. Hope it will not be as bad

"There is no time in history where the people censoring speech were the good guys."

- RFK Jr.

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#114
post #64

Sad that western Europe is pushing so hard for limits to free speech & privacy. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless.

Sad that the United States are pushing so hard to encourage the propagation of propaganda & lies. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless.

[flagged]

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#115
post #38

I just chaired a session at the FOCI conference earlier today, where people were talking about Internet censorship circumvention technologies and how to prevent governments from blocking them. I'd like to remind everyone that the U.S. government has been one the largest funders of that research for decades. Some of it is under USAGM (formerly BBG, the parent of RFE/RL) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agen…

It goes deeper than that. The U.S. Government funds it, discourages other nations from using it, and spies on all web traffic as a result of it. Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA. Within a quick drive to Langley, Quantico, DC, and other places that house three letter agencies I’m not authorized to disclose.

So they… drive the data around NOVA?

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#116
post #70

Fantastic! Now EU just needs to setup freedomgov.eu that bounces off freedom.gov so americans also can browse whatever with no restrictions.

What's the point of the EU hosting an empty page? While tons freedoms and content is legal in the USA that isn't in the EU I don't know of any opposites.

Do you have any examples?

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#117
post #83
post #64

Sad that western Europe is pushing so hard for limits to free speech & privacy. I'm not surprised given their history, but it's sad nonetheless.

It's not sad. It's smart to ban hate speech, blatant lies and things like that. We know, we had the Nazis. Seems the US still has to learn a lesson or two, considering the current political situation. Hope it will not be as bad

Banning Nazi and ISIS propaganda doesn't and hasn't negativity affected anyone but Nazis and Jihadists. It's just plain good policy.

I guess that's why arguments against it always fall back on straw men and hypothetical slippery slopes.

There are plenty of actual things that do negatively affect societies free speech but this isn't even close to one of them.

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#118
post #38

I just chaired a session at the FOCI conference earlier today, where people were talking about Internet censorship circumvention technologies and how to prevent governments from blocking them. I'd like to remind everyone that the U.S. government has been one the largest funders of that research for decades. Some of it is under USAGM (formerly BBG, the parent of RFE/RL) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agen…

It goes deeper than that. The U.S. Government funds it, discourages other nations from using it, and spies on all web traffic as a result of it. Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA. Within a quick drive to Langley, Quantico, DC, and other places that house three letter agencies I’m not authorized to disclose.

> Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA

Nobody who understands the scale of the internet could possibly believe this is true.

Routing internet traffic through a geographical location would increase ping times by a noticeable amount.

Even sending traffic from around the world to a datacenter in VA would require an amount of infrastructure multiple times larger than the internet itself to carry data all that distance. All built and maintained in secret.

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#119

Then won’t foreign governments just ban freedom.gov? This problem has already been solved with networks like Tor and I2P. It seems like it would be more strategic to fund those projects instead.

US can probably use their soft power to influence them not to do that. Also would imagine the US gov could also set up some more censorship resistant access methods.

Re: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere

#120
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nit: If you're filing a flight plan, you do it with the country you're departing from. Even if you're piloting an aircraft departing into the US, it wouldn't have any effect on operations if you couldn't reach US websites. There's also several alternative ways for pilots to file flight plans outside of the web. (The flight plans get passed between countries via AFTN/AMHS, which are dedicated telecommunications networ…

I thought airlines still had to file passenger manifests with CBP separately, no?

Yes, though that's separate from the flight plan.

There's also several different ways to transmit the passenger manifest to CBP - including over a CBP-provided VPN and IATA "Type B" messages sent through ARINC/SITA.

The network for Type B messages is also independent of the Internet (it was developed 60 years ago).

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