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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

#701

Post by graemep »

sensanaty wrote: post #489
petcat wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like censorship is already becoming normalized in the EU and UK. Terrifying.

First off, the UK isn't in the EU, and 2nd, not a single website is blocked for me here in the Netherlands, quite literally none. I can access Discord without an ID, I can watch all the porn I want, I can pirate anything I want from anywhere etc. How many states require IDs to go to porn sites, again? How many journos is it now that Trump blacklisted from the White House? Yeah, lotta freedoms over there...

> First off, the UK isn't in the EU

I would guess that is why the GP said "EU and UK"

> ot a single website is blocked for me here in the Netherlands, quite literally none

One EU country. At the very least I know you have censored search results as that is an EU wide requirement of the right to be forgotten.

> I can pirate anything I want from anywhere etc.

Multiple EU countries are blocking pirate sites. https://torrentfreak.com/european-isps-complain-about-dispro...

Some countries have very broad definitions of hate speech.

There are definitely American sites that block EU visitors because of the cost/risk of GDPR compliance.

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

#702

Post by iso1631 »

NGRhodes wrote: post #205
suhputt wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the time it takes for light to travel from los angeles to virginia is 12 - 16 ms, round trip is 30ms lets say - that is a noticeable delay, and it could be easily disproven that 80% of traffic is literally routed through VA now.. could they just copy the traffic and send it to VA on a side channel? probably?

i used to work, 15 years ago, on a (permissive, not covert) monitoring service for a UK national public service, the NHS spine core. We used switches to mirror ports and capture traffic in promisciouse mode on a few dozen servers split across a few datacentres that all the traffic went througg. We had certs installed to decode https. We could get enough hardware to do this step easily, but fast enough storage was an…

You can only decode those https certificates if you are mitming them (and have a compromised certificate)

A copy of the certificate and private keys won't help thanks to the magic of Diffie–Hellman, you can't passively (assuming you haven't got a practical quantum computer) read the stream

Your company will have deployed root certificates to devices and run as a MITM. This is standard corporate firewall behaviour.

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

#703

Post by iso1631 »

PenguinCoder wrote: post #157
Aurornis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 No, I understand networking hardware quite well actually. I'm also familiar with Room 641A. Room 641A did not capture 80% of internet traffic. If you think 80% of internet traffic could be routed through Room 641A you're not thinking about the infras…

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.

Yes you can trivially tap a fibre -- https://www.gigamon.com/products/access-traffic/network-taps... for example

You can even do this without breaking the fibre

What you can't do is ship 80% of the traffic across the world to the US without either the ISPs agreeing, and thus a conspiracy of thousands of people in thousands of ISPs, or doing it outside the data centres, meaning millions of taps in various ducts around the globe, which would be found on a daily basis.

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

#704

Post by fbn79 »

gpt5 wrote: post #161
nomilk wrote: post #89

Can someone ELI5 how it actually works? Say I'm a UK citizen with advanced glioblastoma (implying loss of faculties, seizures, and pain; no cure, and things to worsen before eventually passing away, possibly some time from now). Suppose I wish to view websites on euthanasia options, but am blocked from doing so by the UK's Online Safety Act. How does/will Freedom.gov help? (is it essentially a free VPN?) Also, as oth…

According to Reuters, it will essentially be a free VPN. https://www.reuters.com/world/us-plans-online-portal-bypass-...

So nothing new. We can just use cloudflare warp

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

#705

Post by account42 »

locknitpicker wrote: post #578
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why diversity of sources is the only way to escape censorship: you get one half truth from one source, another half truth from another source, then two halves make whole truth.

> That's why diversity of sources is the only way to escape censorship: No, it's a page out of the old fascist playbook where flooding the stage with propaganda generates enough confusion to help fascists further their hateful agenda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Fascism means diversity of opinions, democracy means everyone is only allowed to have the opinions you want them to have?

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

#706

Post by Sharlin »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #699
Sharlin wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> very explicitly stated goals of sowing discord within the US's former "allies", to weaken Europe, and to promote racist and fringe-right views. The US government explicitly said that they seek to promote racist and fringe-right views? Do you have any sort of evidence to back it up?

Sure, if that’s your problem with my comment, feel free to rephrase it in your mind to something like "to promote fringe-right and anti-immigration parties and movements that any sane observer recognizes as authoritarian and racist because they’re not even bothering to dogwhistle". If you need a source for that you haven’t been following the news.

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

#707

Post by account42 »

exe34 wrote: post #405
nomilk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might do that too , but access to information is just so utterly critical, and exponentially moreso in circumstances where government brutally cracks down on it, as we saw in Egypt during the Arab Spring and we're seeing in Iran presently.

Will it work when the US government is the one cracking down, banning interviews, etc?

That is a problem with no other country caring as much about free speech, not with the US having an anti-censorship program.

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

#708

Post by Sharlin »

thevillagechief wrote: post #696
Sharlin wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is fine. If successful, the next administration can just leverage it for a different kind of agenda. In fact, by the time we know whether it's successful, this admin will likely be gone. I'm a bit conflicted though. I hated the last admin's censorship efforts for wrong think. Now, looking at the online discourse landscape, I'm starting to think we might have thrown out the baby with the birth water. Why can't we…

Let me guess, you’re American?

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

#709

Post by account42 »

simianparrot wrote: post #342
NuclearPM wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Access to information is dangerous when the information is controlled propaganda.

[flagged]

Don't you know, democracy means censorship, freedom of information means fascism, and most importantly we have always been at war with America.

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

#710

Post by snowpid »

ben_w wrote: post #700
snowpid wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most common people were aware of the cliff in economy between capitalist and communist states. Hence we had so many revolution and communism lost. This was a communist apparatchik. Its like showing truth to MAGA people. Most wont accept it.

> Its like showing truth to MAGA people. Most wont accept it. Could be. That was the other example I was considering using besides Yeltsin, but I figured it would immediately get met with "no u" responses from those who, as you say, won't accept it. That makes for boring conversations where I learn nothing.

see it this way. Yelzin's reaction was very surprising. You can see how other communist burocrats reacted to facts.

Even in democratic societies politicians don't change their beliefs so fast (maybe most human?). But luckily we can vote them out so this is not a big problem.

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