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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

#441

Post by jeroenhd »

Aloisius wrote: post #96
alistairSH wrote: post #31

Won't those other nations just ban freedom.gov?

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.

Europeans don't generally use .gov so if the US tries to pull that, they'll just block whatever .gov their VPN is hosted on.

Southern European countries are blocking whole Cloudflare IP ranges because of the massive grip on the government the sports licensing maffia has there. These countries also don't feature any direct flights to America as far as I can tell.

These blocks may cause (temporary) issues for American business relations and tourism, but such side effects may not be considered so problematic if the US leverages their government infrastructure to attack European legislators.

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

#442

Post by dgellow »

sunaookami wrote: post #432
Epa095 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the TV station lost broadcasting-rights, or you mean the website it actually banned? Cause the website is certainly accessible for me from my European country, although that does not rule out that it is banned in some European countries.

The website rt.com is banned in the whole EU due to a decret by von der Leyen which bypassed parliament. It's trivial to bypass since it's "only" a DNS block but it's still censorship (no matter how you think about the content of RT). Same for Sputnik and the relevant TV channels.

That’s a complete lie. I’m in Germany and can access rt.com perfectly fine

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

#443

Post by ta20240528 »

reactordev wrote: post #179
PenguinCoder wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the most well known, there are other points of presence doing the same thing. Easy and trivial to duplicate traffic at line speed. It doesn't affect the traffic flow itself.

They will never believe you until you show them and that requires a clearance.

No need for a clearance, merely explain that

1. fibre-optic traffic is a beam of light

2. this beam can be passed through a glass prism…

3. the prism splits off say 20% of the light by intensity

4. this 20% is identical to the 80%

5. both the 20% and 80% component are 'bright' enough to be used

6. the 80% continues on its merry way, the 20% is redirected for 'other' uses.

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

#444

Post by sunaookami »

tantalor wrote: post #218

That's not very "America First" Why are my taxes paying for benefits for Europeans? They already killed USAID.

I like that the US government finally speaks out about the rampant censorship from the EU regime but I wouldn't trust a state VPN. But they put the topic on the radar. Hope they can pressure enough to abolish the DSA. And USAID was just funding for propaganda outlets.

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

#445

Post by ivan_gammel »

micw wrote: post #375
ivan_gammel wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you are in Germany, try opening ria.ru. It’s not like we are deprived of something worthy - it is Russian propaganda after all, but it tells enough about freedom of speech.

I am. It just opens. But I can't read russian ^^

Looks like German firewall has more holes than Russian or Chinese one. Are you using VPN? It’s still blocked for me.

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

#446

Post by seszett »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #329
crossroadsguy wrote: post #278

Such an irony that there are two sides trying to control the Internet in their own lovely ways and in the end it's the people who will have to suffer one way or the other. But I do think countries around the world should have a hard look at how the Internet is, even today, de facto controlled by the US. Take ".com" and ".net" domains for example. Like there are efforts underway to get away from SWIFT (and hopefully o…

You think you want US influence to weaken, but you may feel very differently should it happen. There is a lot you’re taking for granted.

These days what people receive of the US influence is mostly interference in politics to favour the far-right, military threats and economic war through tariffs. As well as just random verbal attacks on local politicians on local matters.

I'm sure there is a positive side to the US influence, but it's well hidden and they definitely don't advertise it.

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

#447

Post by Argonaut998 »

pms wrote: post #434

It's a waste of resources, but please do it! The entire "European Union censors" narrative is a hoax [1], so the portal will achieve nothing, but you've got to do what you've got to do! [1] First, the EU countries have much higher World Press Freedom Index than the US. Second, once you start reading how little there is of the alleged "censorship" in the EU, you realize it's a no-brainer aiming to protect people.

Press freedom !== entirety of freedom of speech

European politicians are calling every day to censor social media. People are arrested regularly for social media posts.

Censorship is absolutely an issue in Europe and it’s only getting worse. I welcome such an attitude as this.

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

#448

Post by generic92034 »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #264
touwer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is calling people nazis hate speech?

It depends. One prominent figure of the right-wing populist party AfD in Germany has been called a Nazi. When he sued the originator the court decided that, considering the circumstances, was not an insult in the sense of the law.

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

#449

Post by krige »

jjmarr wrote: post #321
jadenPete wrote: post #107

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.

> 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. The US government is responsible for 35% of Tor's funding[1] and has been its primary sponsor since Tor was invented as a side project in the US Naval Research Lab. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tor_Project

Is, or was? I vaguely recall Doge gutting this among many other things?

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

#450

Post by jampekka »

ljlolel wrote: post #259
amarant wrote: post #168

What content bans does Europe have? /Confused European

Russia Today is banned, for one

rt.com works fine in Finland at least. I don't think we have website bans in general aside something like CSAM and copyright reasons, and even the latter at least is rare.

There seems to be a manufactured narrative from the US right how "Europe" is somehow doing large scale censorship.

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