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

reuters.com

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

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At this point US has close to zero (if not negative) "soft" power.

Trade and tarriff relief are an option still. Despite how shitty the US has been and the distrust that will cause in the future access to US markets will be very attractive until the economy collapses. Soft power isn't just from countries liking you after all.

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

#312
post #297
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would educating people instead and giving them more options for information, not be better than banning access to information?

Intuitively yes, but it's possible that this is one of our biases speaking From my memory (might be mistaken) there have been attempts to somewhat study this via polls etc, and determined that coverage via propaganda (specifically Fox News) is less helpful then randomly guessing what actually happened... But ymmv, social studies are always hard to trust, because it's borderline impossible to prove cause and effect

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

#313

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…

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

Neither would anybody have believed that 8 out of 10 hard drive chips can contain any rootkits. Yet, here we are, and the insanity of it is that we've found lots of malware attributed to EQGRP, and the Snowden leaks (from the perspective of Booz Allen) have confirmed it.

You should read up on quantum routing.

They don't have to route through any specific location if they can just infiltrate the routers of your neighbors. Any data packet from the originating server will arrive slower at your location than the data packet of your neighbor. In that scenario TLS becomes pretty useless if the CA itself is also exchangeable, because you can't rely on TCP or UDP. Ironically the push for UDP makes it much easier to implement in the underlying token ring architectures and their virtual routing protocols like VC4 and later.

That's how the internet and a star topology (or token ring topology on city level) was designed.

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

#314

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?

You just don't have imagination. Google, just by itself, controls 89% of the traffic in the Internet. And we know that the government can get any information they want from them, without even asking too much. If you combine this with other major companies operating very close to the US government, it is probable that more than 95% of the web traffic outside China that is easily within reach of these sinister 3 letter organizations.

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At this point US has close to zero (if not negative) "soft" power.

This is what democrats and Hollywood are for. Some people still believe in them.

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There have also been other high profile cases of people being arrested for posting things that were not like that burn the hotel down case Such as? > Is nobody allowed to be concerned about any of this without being some horrible underground extremist, in your opinion? Horrible underground extremist? Not so much. More likely just someone who consumes a very particular slice of media that puts a dishonest (at best)…

> > There have also been other high profile cases of people being arrested for posting things that were not like that burn the hotel down case > Such as? That was the only thing in my comment you took issue with? Great, that's easy to clear up because there's a few around. Here's one https://www.leeds-live.co.uk/news/leeds-news/yorkshire-man-a... Arrested for saying "F--- Palestine. F--- Hamas. F--- Islam. Want to pr…

The key thing to understand is that Europeans want clear rules around hate speech, online harassment and such. Thus lawmakers are acting to find laws which encapsulate these. In Germany, we have some simple ones surrounding using Nazi symbols and speech. These rules generally work well in our civil law context. Civil law usually is rather broad strokes and there might be cases where something injust happens which requires tuning laws.

If you come from a common law context the whole idea might seem strange.

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

#320

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.

Sure — but the UK or EU has to accept the constant rhetoric of “you clearly don’t support free speech, you block freedom.gov” when discussing with the US. I don’t think it’s meant to be a perfect solution; I think it’s meant to be a political tool. Also, the US does fund Tor — originally US Navy + DARPA, now through Dept of State. Entirely possible that they’ll eventually operate a Tor onion site for freedom.gov too.

This is grade-school level mind games. Is it really that easy?
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