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

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 1001 posts

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

#131

Post by Henchman21 »

Aurornis wrote: post #118
reactordev wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Never tapped a port, eh?

Edited to not be so flippant: I work in HFT/finance where recording all traffic is required I think by law and definitely for one's own sanity. We're able to maintain nanosecond trades while capturing ALL the traffic. It has zero impact on the traffic. This is normal, widely used tech. Think stuff like Ixia passive taps and/or Arista Metamako FPGA-based tap/mux devices.

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

#132

Post by black_puppydog »

Sorry, but whatever you think about the laws that lead to these blockages, how else are european governments supposed to take that than a direct attack on their executive powers by a foreign government?

This being besides the fact that the folks crying wolf over "censorship" regularly conflate flat-out lies with valuable and protected speech.

Edit: I mean, I love tor as much as the next person, but imagine the reaction you'd get if an EU state (say, Germany) was to launch an official page with the express goal of allowing access to information censored by the Chinese government, targeting it directly to chinese citizens.

Could you make a moral case for this? Probably.

But would you be surprised or offended if the Chinese government took any measures they saw fit to strong-arm Germany into shutting that site right back down? Probably not. And the crowd here would probably go "bruh what did you expect?"

... Now waiting for examples of exactly that having happened already. :D

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

#133

Post by nradov »

black_puppydog wrote: post #132

Sorry, but whatever you think about the laws that lead to these blockages, how else are european governments supposed to take that than a direct attack on their executive powers by a foreign government? This being besides the fact that the folks crying wolf over "censorship" regularly conflate flat-out lies with valuable and protected speech. Edit: I mean, I love tor as much as the next person, but imagine the reacti…

In enlightened, civilized countries speech is protected regardless of whether anyone subjectively considers it to be "valuable".

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

#134

Post by kg »

Aloisius wrote: post #80
csrse wrote: 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 restrictions do Americans have now that would make that useful?

Increasingly widespread age restriction laws?

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

#135

Post by MiiMe19 »

NewJazz wrote: post #125
MiiMe19 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Elon let a bunch of people generate lewd photographs depicting minors, then published it.

And the pencil companies let people draw lewd drawings depicting minors. The typewriter manufacturers let a bunch of people write lewd stories depicting minors.

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

#136

Post by carlm42 »

MiiMe19 wrote: post #114
carlm42 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

I don't know where you live but I've been able to express myself without any form of approval. Granted, I tend to not encourage genocide or glorify fascist regimes, but that's just me.

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

#138

Post by Henchman21 »

Aurornis wrote: post #126
dboreham wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Going through" doesn't necessarily imply store and forward. It could be tapped elsewhere and shipped to WVA. fwiw the idea of running a network in order to tap it is hardly new. The British operated largest telegraph network in the world in the 1800's for that reason.

You think there's an entire shadow infrastructure across the United States or world that carries 80% of all internet traffic all the way to VA? It would have to be several times larger than the internet infrastructure itself due to the distances involved. All built and maintained in secret?

No. That isn't required at all. Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

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

#139

Post by black_puppydog »

nradov wrote: post #133
black_puppydog wrote: post #132

Sorry, but whatever you think about the laws that lead to these blockages, how else are european governments supposed to take that than a direct attack on their executive powers by a foreign government? This being besides the fact that the folks crying wolf over "censorship" regularly conflate flat-out lies with valuable and protected speech. Edit: I mean, I love tor as much as the next person, but imagine the reacti…

In enlightened, civilized countries speech is protected regardless of whether anyone subjectively considers it to be "valuable".

rofl, go ahead try spreading lies about someone in the US. IIUC, the slander laws are just as draconian over there. the difference is in whether you can spread the same lies about someone with or without deep pockets without retribution.

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

#140

Post by Aurornis »

Henchman21 wrote: post #131
Aurornis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Never tapped a port, eh? Edited to not be so flippant: I work in HFT/finance where recording all traffic is required I think by law and definitely for one's own sanity. We're able to maintain nanosecond trades while capturing ALL the traffic. It has zero impact on the traffic. This is normal, widely used tech. Think stuff like Ixia passive taps and/or Arista Metamako FPGA-based tap/mux devices.

> Never tapped a port, eh?

I have. I have a background in high speed networking.

Have you ever paused for a moment to consider how much infrastructure would be required to send 80% of data on the internet across the country and into a single datacenter in Virginia?

If you've worked in HFT, you can probably at least start to imagine the scale we're talking about.

Post reply on HN