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Staying ahead of censors in 2025

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Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#321

Post by nephihaha »

orbital-decay wrote: post #223
lukan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"as almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech'" Are you serious here? In russia you get problems for calling a war a war and worse problems if you say it is a bad war. In UK you certainly can call a war a war and you can critize the government or other people all day long. What you cannot do is calling for violence against them. Or do you have counterexamples?

South Korea had ID-based web for two decades, everything you say is recorded and tied to your identity, forever. Please do educate yourself about the state of the political speech in the Korean part of the web.

South Korea was under the Park dictatorship for a big chunk of its history. Most of Europe was under dictatorship of one kind or another within living memory. Seems some people can't lose that mentality.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#323

Post by 4bpp »

Defletter wrote: post #299
4bpp wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> freeze peach Do you not think that trying to malign your opposition by putting a comical misspelling in their mouths is a bit infantile as a rhetorical tactic? The same thing being done to you would look something like an insinuation that what is being banned is "hurting someone's widdle fee-fees"; surely the discussion here would not benefit if everyone stooped down to that level.

> surely the discussion here would not benefit if everyone stooped down to that level. Oh we were already at that level by that time: the comment mine responds to makes the claim that "it is really difficult to define what hate speech is" (untrue); that "more often than not it's used as a cudgel to silence the opposition" (unsubstantiated); and claims that the UK government's intentions match that of Iran and Russia…

Do you think that the people who made those remarks you cite considered them untrue themselves? If yes, you are suggesting bad faith (which should be grounds to extricate yourself from the discussion and/or call it out, not add fuel to the fire); if not, you are suggesting that factual disagreement is appropriately answered by childishness, which basically is saying that you think every discussion worth the name should devolve into childishness.

Often, it seems like this concept of "disinformation" you invoke just serves as a way people give themselves moral license to suspend normal rules of debate conduct in the face of disagreement. Being charitable to your opponents and having to engage with their claims is tiring and difficult, and sometimes they even come better prepared - how much easier if you can just frame dissent as dangerous enemy action and shut it down.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#324

Post by immibis »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #319
immibis wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning children from accessing things proven to be harmful to children does not a dictator make. Or else you'd be rallying just as hard to allow children to drink alcohol.

> Or else you'd be rallying just as hard to allow children to drink alcohol Why? I don't have a threshold at 127 in my luminance channel. Just a reminder - what children are allowed or not is not any government's business, it's parents' one. Which requires tearing their asses off from sofas and their eyes from screens and actually talk to their children and be in the know of their circles and activities.

I'm glad you agree that if a child happens to be born to parents who aren't very good at parenting, they deserve to suffer. Basically if a child's parents smoke around them and give them lung cancer, all we should do is yell at them and moan on the internet, not actually do anything (via the government) to prevent it.

Nothing you've said contradicts that you think the government should not forbid children from buying alcohol.

Social media appears to be more harmful to a child than low quantities of alcohol, but less harmful than lung cancer.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#325

Post by morserer »

jmnicolas wrote: post #171
commandersaki wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to how CIA has a technology fund that gave money to Signal; because they use it?

> because they use it? My hunch is because they have a backdoor in it.

They don't necessarily need one to do their jobs.

Signal is centralized, hosted on AWS, and through a mixture of legal procedures codified by US law and their bundled gag orders (PR/TT order, SCA warrant, FISA 702, and usage of NSLs) that can be extended for significant lengths of time and, occasionally, in de facto perpetuity, all metadata (who is talking to who, when, from where) can be monitored in real-time without Signal ever being informed. Combined with existing legal procedures for telecoms and VOIP providers for real-time + retrospective location tracking by phone number/associated IMEI/IP address by way of tower connectivity (this framework is required by law [specifically, CALEA] to be implemented by default for all users, not after the fact nor on-request), that's enough data to escalate to standard law enforcement procedures if an incriminating link is found, whereby the phone's internal message history can be dumped either through private (ex.: Cellebrite) or functionally coercive legal means (refusing to decrypt data can get you jail time if you are the subject of an investigation, and deletion of data such as via duress pins etc can get you a destruction of evidence charge), at which point all of your messages can be dumped.

And this all ignores the fact that firmware for basebands and cryptoprocessors (and most other hardware components in all devices) is closed-source, proprietary code, and that Signal piggybacks off of device encryption for at-rest message data instead of reimplementing it in userland. (This feature used to exist and was removed, but can be re-added through the Molly fork.)

I've also known protesters who have also had Signal geoblocked at the site of a protest the moment it was slated to start, forcing members of said protest to fall back to unencrypted methods at crucial times. Being centralized and using US-based cloud infra does a lot to compromise anonymity and security, even if message content isn't immediately readable.

Luckily, Signal is not vulnerable to push notification interception, but if you want a great real-world example of how gag-ordered dragnet metadata surveillance visible to both domestic and foreign governments (by way of international intelligence agreements) can look for massive corporations rendered helpless by this legal framework, that's a great case study to look into. https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...

Throwing out the accusation of apps being "backdoored" just obscures the real, de facto "backdoors" that are US law.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#326

Post by Defletter »

4bpp wrote: post #323
Defletter wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> surely the discussion here would not benefit if everyone stooped down to that level. Oh we were already at that level by that time: the comment mine responds to makes the claim that "it is really difficult to define what hate speech is" (untrue); that "more often than not it's used as a cudgel to silence the opposition" (unsubstantiated); and claims that the UK government's intentions match that of Iran and Russia…

Do you think that the people who made those remarks you cite considered them untrue themselves? If yes, you are suggesting bad faith (which should be grounds to extricate yourself from the discussion and/or call it out, not add fuel to the fire); if not, you are suggesting that factual disagreement is appropriately answered by childishness, which basically is saying that you think every discussion worth the name shou…

Do you also insist that we treat with proper decorum those who throw out assertions that jetfuel cannot melt steel beams? I notice you have yet to criticise them for posting what is at best misguided and unsubstantiated misinformation, and at worst disinformation. Hardly decorum on their part, is it? Instead, you are hyperfocusing on my "freeze peach", disregarding everything else I said in my comment. I find this to be a boring distraction from the topic at hand.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#327

Post by cs02rm0 »

ben_w wrote: post #96
cs02rm0 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He’s a proper democrat. The same Starmer who's cancelled local elections? Who's not looked at the polls and thought maybe it's time to go, because the demos clearly don't want me? The same Starmer who said no rise in NI in the manifesto, only to increase NI? The same Starmer who raised the threshold of votes required for an MP from within the Labour party to challenge his leadership? He's no proper democrat. People…

> The same Starmer who's cancelled local elections? False: https://fullfact.org/online/council-elections-war-cancelled/ > Who's not looked at the polls and thought maybe it's time to go, because the demos clearly don't want me? You seem to have missed the "did actually win power" and "this is how democracy works in the UK" parts. I agree he should go, but I could say that about all of the UK politicians, they're all…

It only becomes false to say they've been cancelled if they happen. They're planning on postponing them again, and if that continues to happen indefinitely, they've been cancelled.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdd5p5gyvveo

Starmer doesn't just have negative approval ratings. His are through the floor. The last voting intention poll from YouGov (which has been relatively favourable for Labour) would have given them just 69 seats - fewer than the Lib Dems currently have.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#329

Post by kolektiv »

immibis wrote: post #201
kolektiv wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would require the police to believe that an offence is likely to have been committed. While I am more than ready to criticise the police for many, many things, I'm not sure they're likely to just take that at face value... (As you've specified first contact, etc., that seems likely - of course there could be situations where such a communication would be an offence, such as in the context of a restraining/exclus…

So do you think an offence was committed in this scenario?

In the scenario which you've outlined, where you say "hello" to me, having never spoken to me before? No, I don't think that's an offence, but more to the point, whether I did or not, the police are unlikely to. We don't operate in a system where the police simply take the word of anyone who reports a feeling, the police have a duty to assess whether a crime has likely occurred.

Re: Staying ahead of censors in 2025

#330

Post by kolektiv »

graemep wrote: post #257
kolektiv wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, there's some context missing from those summaries though, no? In the first case it's not just "arrested for praying" it's "arrested for being in an exclusion zone specifically designated to try and stop you harassing people undertaking a lawful activity". They would have been arrested regardless of activity, it's effectively a restraining order and describing it as "for praying" is nonsense. In the second case, i…

> Ok, there's some context missing from those summaries though, no? In the first case it's not just "arrested for praying" it's "arrested for being in an exclusion zone specifically designated to try and stop you harassing people undertaking a lawful activity" How is standing by the road side saying and doing nothing harassing someone? The law is clearly not intended to prevent harassment (which was already illegal).…

> How is standing by the road side saying and doing nothing harassing someone?

If you're standing by an abortion clinic, and you're a prominent anti-abortion campaigner, who has been known to harass people in the past, it was considered that your presence there is, in and of itself, intimidating to people who wish to access a legal service without undue interference. The ruling is not intended to prevent any of the things you mention, there are still plenty of ways that organisations can make those things generally known if they wish to, just not a particular group of people directly outside a clinic where they have a history of illegal behaviour.

In terms of misgendering Linehan, singular they has been around since the 14th century at the latest, and many style guides are more than happy with the usage for an individual where either gender is unknown, or where gender is considered irrelevant to the case in point. In this case, I would say the latter applies, but I am happy to acknowledge that Linehan identifies as "he" - significantly happier than he is to afford others similar courtesy.

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