Can you lock millions of users out of Internet? If that's not elite in 2025, who is?
Pedro Sanchez forced a public investment (€1134 billion) into that company using the SEPI so he can control Telefonica. Then he changed Telefonica president with a socialist pawn, inserted many socialist "elite" into the company, and as a cherry on top, he embedded Huawei inside Telefonica core systems.
Listen, kids, the higher you get into politics, the faster the textbooks (Marx, Smith, and antything in between) get tossed out of a window and drugs, prostitutes and hard power it's what matters.
Better if you don't know how actual politics work, because it that would be pure Realpolitiks. Imagine an 1984 and a Brave New World merded and psychos on top keeping the illusion because of raw power. You have that today.
The closest against to that would be the EFF, Richard Stallman, and hardcore groups and humanists working maybe for pride, but helping the rest of the society as the main social law (Golden Rule).
But we are not ready. We have a 'hardware' from Neolitics and a 'software' from the Space Era... no wonder the are wars and hardcore collisions between ideologies...
They also mention Movistar, O2, and Vodafone. A systematic violation of the internet's integrity, carried out on the scale of an entire so-called "free" EU(!) country. It's a disaster.
Wait, is that why yesterday internet was so janky? Encountered multiple websites that seemed offline when visited from my home (Spain) Vodafone connection, but all my remote servers could still access them. In my decade+ of living here, never heard of them doing a "Ah today it's Saturday, lets block Cloudflare" thing until this very moment. Have any resources (Spanish or English) where I can read more about this? Fucking ridiculous if this is true.
https://www.eleconomista.es/tecnologia/noticias/13287968/03/...
https://vercel.com/blog/update-on-spain-and-laliga-blocks-of...
Where did you heard it?
It is not only factually incorrect, every point is just completely wrong: no favorable candidate to Moscow was elected in 2014, US did not worked to undermine democracy and there is absolutely zero evidence of both of these things happened.
This is what RT and other propaganda networks is dangerous, it creates a fake reality which people believe in. Then you act on this knowledge as if it is real.
I think the current shift in acceptance of blocking social media for children is a start and allows us to consider it’s positive and negative effects.
I believe in democracy. If people want to listen to ridiculous and false Russian propaganda or support Russia against Ukraine they should be able to without hindrance, even if their politicians or the better informed don’t like it. It’s their job to persuade their fellows. They shouldn’t get to declare their beliefs are right and beyond democratic contestation.
Sometimes democracies make really bad decisions. Alciabiades conned the Athenians into the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. That’s the tradeoff you get for having a democracy. Declaring some subjects out of bounds is taking away democracy and installing something else instead, with those tradeoffs, that we as a society decided we weren’t going to make, without consensus.
Many of the real problems in society, unfortunately, have no easy solutions and require very substantive evaluation, weighing expert opinions, etc. In the current environment it has become very hard to get a lot of people to even consider these or, if they want, elect someone to do it in their stead.
TLDR: populism + propaganda causes significant dysfunction in democracies, especially ones that aren’t winner-takes-all.
These are all the exact same arguments made by regimes like the CCP as to why their authoritarian methods are necessary. It’s all for the public order and the public good as unfortunately, many people are stirred up even against their own interest by meddlers, demagogues, and foreign interests. Fortunately, the CCP knows better, as the Party makes sure that the experts are making decisions based on all the data.
I would prefer to live in a democracy, and it astounds me to see people in the West repeating word for word what Russians and Chinese regime apologists say about their governments, all while explaining it’s all necessary to protect democracy.
As opposed to your positions. The masses, well, they think wrong, but you, you thought long and hard about everything and you came to the right conclusions.
What's next? Give the right to vote only to the "right" people?
After all, if you can't trust the judgment of the masses because their views are based mainly on emotional reasons then surely you don't think they should have a say in how their country should be run?
You are presenting an argument and I am pointing out the flaws in it.
I am also presenting the logical conclusion of your argument that maybe you were not comfortable making in your original comment, that is that a certain part of the population is not capable of thinking rationally and therefore, someone else must decide what they should be able to see, hear and read because otherwise they may make the "wrong" choices.
That, in turn implies that their votes could be also swayed by emotional reasons, so if you think that these people are not capable of making up their own mind about the issues that we face today, then surely, you are not fine with having them express their opinion in the voting booth.
> But clearly populism combined with propaganda isn’t working out either in a number of countries.
So your solution to populism is to refrain the population from accessing views that you find problematic?
> I realize very well the problems of following this line of thought
I don't think you do because if you did then you would know that having the state decide what citizens should have the right to see or hear is exactly the same kind of rhetoric that authoritarian regimes use today.
> Should we just stop thinking about causes and what could be done about it, because it’s uncomfortable to think about it?
I don't think anyone is feeling uncomfortable looking at the many issues that the western democracies are facing today.
I am uncomfortable however when someone thinks that the solution to these problems is to go down the path of censorship because sooner or later someone will use the same excuse to start censoring political opponents/ so-called undesirable views in the name of saving democracies or protecting the children or fighting terrorism as it has been seen time and time again.
The solution to the views that you find problematic such as the ones expressed on RT is not found in the reduction of free speech, it is done through education and demonstration of the facts.
Sorry, I'm more confortable with RT being blocked than having another Adolf Hitler screaming their own propaganda.
Screw Russia and China. The Internet blocking committee should probably also block Tiktok while they're at it, as it makes people's brains rot.
Is that really a good example? Weimar Germany regularly suppressed and censored Nazi newspapers and publications, shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers, and even at one point suppressed party gatherings.[1] Obviously, it did not work, and the Nazis used the same laws and precedent to suppress their enemies when they took power, and were able to campaign with statements like "in all of Germany, why are WE silenced?"
You can take two things away from this:
1. Weimar should have suppressed the Nazis EVEN HARDER. Weimar needed an even more stringent censorship regime, shutting down any publication and arresting the editors at the slightest whiff of wrongthink. They should have deployed informers to identify and arrest dissidents before they broke out into the public arena.
OR
2. Weimar Germany was a deeply unpopular and dysfunctional regime that had already failed. Governments should do better to represent the interests of their people so that things never get to that point. The Nazis would never have obtained any power if Germany had been doing well and people felt represented by their government, no matter what kind of crazy propaganda they put out; people don't choose extremism because of propaganda, they become propagandized when they are deeply disaffected. Censorship only further delegitimized the regime and increased the popularity of the Nazis, as it showed they were a threat to the people in power that were perceived to be mismanaging the country.
[1] https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...
When that happens, you won't be happy anymore and you will go on Twitter complaining that your government is turning fascist in a hurry and ask how nobody did anything to stop this.
But you probably think that it's never going to happen because you are one of the good people, not the scum of the earth that dares watching Tiktok.
This is the same argument as for encryption. You can't have encryption only for the good guys and not for the criminals. You either have encryption that protects everyone including criminals or you have no encryption.
In this case, you can't have free speech while advocating for censorship against what you consider to be propaganda.
Either everyone has the right to express themselves, including pro war lunatics or you right to free speech will eventually go extinct because then it's only a matter of time before someone else will use the same argument to start censoring a topic or an idea that you care about and they will do it the with the same zeal as you when you agreed to censor RT.
Yet despite this fact that has been proven time and time again, here we are in 2025 with people like you who applaud censorship.
The good solution would be the educate the population about critical thinking, and to use their brain when they see information.
If you just censor things, you hide the real problems, and end up with dumb people without critical judgment (or no access to information).
It’s very easy to convince anyone to support your cause. Just tell them they are the real victims, that they have been deprived of their rightful privilege, and that it is someone else’s fault. Give them undue credit, take away their inconvenient responsibilities. I promise you, they will have zero motivation to uncover your lies.
We have a collective responsibility to protect the truth - the actual, messy, complicated, real-life truth.
At the end, this political system is about supporting current power who settled by force (and to whom you have to pay a tax to not be sent into physical jail, and all your belongings taken).
Remember that at the beginning, these nice people are actually people who killed to be in place, and collected a lot of power and money, and that are now defending their position.
Kingdoms, then Dictatorship were too unstable, and this gave birth to Democracy, still with the same elites.
In some way, it is a softer continuation of conquest-coercion dressed as consent.
The newest generations use propaganda to settle; the approach changes, but the goal is ultimately the same.
There is a saying: if voting would change things, it is long time that it would have been forbidden
The whole idea of supressing stupidity in a democracy leads to some sort of elitist society.
there's nothing wrong with this. Stable democracies tend to be republican and elitist. One of the reasons why the US has been, until recently, an exceptionally stable country was because decision making was largely insulated from the whims of the public. Democracy properly understood is best used as a tool for legitimacy and as a check against the worst abuses of power, not actually as a tool for decision making.
Having the inmates run the asylum is generally a bad idea, we've known this since Plato.
Except, in the case of RT, it was not justified in an abstract way at all. Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.
To put it another way, if a judge can imprison a murderer for life as justified by the motive of reducing murders, what's stopping them from imprisoning everyone with no justification at all? Well, in practice the evidence required is quite a hurdle to this.
If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused, then you're arguing against the concept of punitive action outright.
Can you give a concrete example? (Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered, in years of people denigrating RT on the Internet.)
> Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered
I err on the side of brevity, not seeing a claim that RT's removal was unjust in the comment I was responding to, I felt no need to justify it myself.
Plenty of people have never seen moon hoax theorists' propaganda. They imagine if they see it, they'll quickly see through it for its absurdity. But they're often wrong. Moon hoax theorist's propaganda is actually much better than you think. They can point out lots of "inconsistencies", which do have an explanation, but aren't immediately obvious at all. You see they have experience meeting people like you, but you don't have experience meeting people like them.
I used moon hoaxers as an example because their sophisticated propaganda actually have been exposed and explained a few times, although it still isn't common knowledge why e.g. it seems the exact same rock is right behind an astronaut in two different photos. But that isn't nearly as true for suppressed ideologies. You haven't heard their arguments.
Consider the cost of the sites I listed. Literally, how do you pay these companies? With the monetization of your attention, first and foremost. Good journalism costs money to produce, leaving good journalists unable to be the highest bidder.
If it had been more effective, more people would become very impressed the first time they came across a new to them, consistent (more or less!) narrative universe in which the bad guys are the good guys. Not only that, but their narrative incorporates a bunch of entirely true, verifiable damning truths about "our" side.
I don't have a side in terms of a political entity or official, I'm defending evidence-based action. I genuinely think my life is better because I don't have to defend anyone uncritically, but you're welcome to try and change my mind I guess lol
There are people who see that as positive, because are used to be extremely careful and conscious of their words. But is a very thin line, where one word can obliterate your life as you know it.
This sparked a discussion about how to handle hate spech, as for regular people being called a dick does not result in a 06:00 am. police raid with six officers.
In the aftermath, a mural in a left wing culture center has been painted over multiple times with the tweet and a call for his resignation [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g...
[2] https://images.welt.de/67dd7b08559c903aae8287ac/12efd9779a84...
There are literally thousands of cases constantly of different severity, but freedom looks different to me. https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/habeck-beleidigu...
The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do). The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.
And ... ?
> The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do).
My GAF meter is pretty low for anti-secular groups that shot first. And their own neighbours who were "supposed" to be their allied seem to think the same
There were and are plenty of reasonable groups one could work with, but the genocide is about grabbing land, asserting dominance and exacting revenge, while feeding a victimhood complex that is never able to acknowledge its own mistakes.
Neither Ukraine nor Israel is part of EU or NATO.
Ukraine is most definitely a part of Europe.
Israel definitely should be sanctioned till it stops its war crimes because doing nothing will directly affect us.
“Why can’t I play with the kid who is in timeout? Is it because you hate my freedom?”
What do you prefer instead, to make domain registrars enforce sanctions instead of blocking on DNS level? That would quickly make so that no one with Russian passport is able to register a domain no matter how much we are against russia or putin
It's pure hypocrisy coupled with conformity - or rather virtue signalling. Send junk weapons to Ukraine to showcase that you do support the cause, meanwhile keep buying gas the same time go after their propaganda because that looks nice.
In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished.
Now imagine you have a Ruzzian TV station publishing hard core porn for children to see, how to you punsish them without paid trolls claiming censorship ? Because this si what happens, in Romania Romanian TV station need to respect the Romanian laws , liek for example pay fines and retract any falsehoods and mistakes, but Ruzzians can publish fake documents and videos and if we want them to respect the laws of our countries we it is censorship... blocking faked documents is bad, blocking boobs is good in the land of the free
rt hasn't done this and there are concrete laws against doing this, if rt violated them, they would/should fined/suspended, it's really that simple, do you have any real examples of illegal things they've carried out?
and if you're implying that extrajudicial measures are the only effective method to deal w/ situations like these, then there's an issue w/ the laws
just because censorship is carried out against a cause you don't like, doesn't make it justified, since it's very likely to be used in less benevolent ways in the future
If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to watch your kids and install a porn filter on their computer / tv / phones. It is pointless to have websites to verify that you are old enough, as there always be websites from abroad who will not respect the law, and it forces you to leak your identity (who becomes tied to your IP address).
If you are not happy with propaganda, it is your role and the role of schools to educate people around about how to consume information and look with a critical view.
The Internet used to be cool in the '90 when it wasn't regulated and Meta, Google and Tiktok didn't exist. Now it's all ads, propaganda and hate speech.
Just think about this (which is not 100% correct, but for the sake of discussion): it's probably not meta, google and tiktok. It's the internet peoples who are the source of all that. It's peoples who say hate, who push for ideas they believe in, and they also (surprise!) publish ads! (While google et cetera are just a medium, with lots of moderation, yep.).
Setting limits on what content can be shown at what times isn’t censorship because you’re not actually censoring content. What you’re doing is setting rules about scheduling content.
The thing I referred to in my previous comment is more of a historical thing before smart TVs and similar tech. Current RF technology is still just an evolution of the same signals sent 70+ years ago. So they’d moderate content via scheduling. “Terrestrial TV” still works that way today.
I used to be a hardline freedom of information defender, but we must face the fact that humanity has become way too good at manufactoring opinions and even facts. We're exposed to this threat at all levels, from your local company invading your feed with hidden ads in legitimate tiktok content to nation states influencing your political worldview.
Considering yourself immune to this manipulation is as naive as thinking you don't need vaccines - depressingly, we've far beyond the point where individual protection is enough.
So let me flip the question: if a certain thing is illegal in a jurisdiction, but hosted outside, is it justified to block access to the hosting provider (notably, including Cloudflare and other giants)?
The decision to classify something as propaganda should never be the role of a government, much less blocking it.
But that's something that's close to impossible for continental European cultures to ever understand, at a gut level.
The Russian propaganda spends a lot of resources on reinforcing high-minded ideals that provide a scaffolding for the intellectual types to climb on. The suckers and idiots fall for the more odious stuff.
But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.
Just because two things superficially share some traits doesn't mean they are equivalent, at all. "Full-blown warfare against their own populations" is a bit dramatic, don't you think? As a German, I can tell you, while the government doesn't much act to my benefit, I am not exactly at war with them either. Intelligence, military and police don't have the competence or power, either. Most importantly, like in many proper democracies, there is a plurality of opinions and oversight in parliament, which prevents this sort of thing at scale. "Full-blown warfare" would imply a grand conspiracy, that's simply not factual.
Apart from the UK, Hungary and Poland, I think that's true for most western countries. The US is a bit exceptional, of course, since... well, I don't know what the fuck they are smoking there.
For that matter, in most cases where RT has been linked to me, I couldn't see any clear way that the story advanced Russian interests, except perhaps by trying to paint the USA as full of internal social and cultural conflicts. But, frankly, American media does a pretty good job of that, too. (And many of those media outlets have also grossly misrepresented many events relevant to those conflicts — including ones where I know very well that they were misrepresented because I witnessed them first-hand. For example, I watched the Rittenhouse trial live-streamed, and then read media coverage describing something barely recognizable as what I just saw.)
(Besides, it's not like they're trying to hide that "rt" stands for Russia Today.)
Propaganda usually isn't banned, except in specific cases (defamation, hate speech, etc...). But AFAIK, RT is not special in that regard, it is just the kind of content one would expect from a website openly affiliated with Russian authorities.
It’s incredibly valuable to understand how the enemy thinks.
Once again someone spreading Russian FUD.
>A rights holder represented in the CUII can find copyright infringements and then file a lawsuit with the court for the implementation of a DNS block. If the court decides that a DNS block is lawful, this block is implemented by the Internet access providers organized in the CUII. The prerequisites for a blocking claim against the Internet access provider pursuant to § 8 DDG are met, - if a rights holder can prove his copyright, - his works are published on the Internet without his consent, - he has no other way of remedying the infringement, - if the blocking is reasonable and proportionate.
[0] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Digitales/Sch...
In many cases, even investigative journalists cannot obtain details about governance processes and decisions made behind closed doors. The government often cites strict data protection rules and uses them as a shield against disclosure.
Another example: In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement. If someone feels they have been treated "unfairly", good luck to prove that in court when two officers present a completely different version of events, especially since body cameras are very rare in germany.
At first sight, I don't see how the FOIA is much different to the Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (freedom of information law). https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informationsfreiheitsgesetz
Isn't the FOIA also applied on the federal level?
> In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement
I think this is misleading. It's not especially prohibited. Generally, law enforcement enjoys the same rights as everyone else, that is having a right to privacy and the confidentiality of the spoken, non-public word. You can't film law enforcement folks preemptively, or without cause, if they have the reasonable expectation of confidentiality of the spoken word. If law enforcement is breaking the law, you are allowed to collect video evidence. In any case, you are not allowed to publish non-public video recordings or pictures of anyone, taken without explicit, or implicit consent. Public or non-public here means the implied confidentiality of communication, not necessarily where it happened. Eg. talking on a public street doesn't make every conversation public.
Mind you, in Germany, illegally obtained evidence isn't as easily dismissed as it is in the US. If you record the police without cause (illegally) and they happen to commit a crime, your recording isn't tainted evidence as far as I know, but rather you may (if indicted) face legal consequences yourself, independently. Again, publication is a completely different matter.
Legality of video recordings is pretty much irrelevant, regarding the legal power dynamics you described, as the police could just confiscate your phone and find some excuse for destroying the evidence. Independent oversight seems more important to address this.
On the other hand, I do think law enforcement should enjoy privacy, generally, as everyone else. I don't think, having a camera in your face with every interaction is helpful for anyone, all things considered, but would rather aid escalation and discourage leniency. Constant video surveillance just sucks, no matter who is doing the recording.
Why in heaven's name would anyone think that censorship is NOT super heavy-handed in Germany?
Does Germany have a recent or historical track record of EVER being a liberal-minded place?
There is no such thing as "understandable" when it comes to censorship, especially when it comes to Nazi imagery, and especially in Germany.
If there's actually one place where it needs to be remembered, it's absolutely there.
Honestly, wartime foreign media blocking is the only justified censorship type IMHO. Even then I would say that should be accessible with a delay. Why? Because media is is part of the tools in the war, up until the last day before the invasion Moscow officials on Twitter were mocking USA and other western leaders warning that Russia has troops build up and the invasion was imminent. The traditional Russian media was also writing articles about this. This was putting political pressure on the Western leaders, portraying them as warmongers reducing their credibility etc. Then suddenly one night Putin had 55min speech on why it was the West was the actual invaders and started the invasion. To this day, the Russian propaganda holds strong and awful lot of people are convinced that it is Russia who is facing invasion and is fighting bravely against the aggressors. Including the US administration since a few months.
On the other hand, complete permanent blocking also undermines populations assessment of the reality. As it turned out, the West wasn't also entirely truthful on the progress of the war and the effectiveness of the sanctions.
I don't know maybe we should have safeguards instead of censorship.
> In 1964, The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger, was initially rejected because of two scenes in which the actresses Linda Geiser and Thelma Oliver fully expose their breasts; and a sex scene between Oliver and Jaime Sánchez, which it described as "unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful." ... On a 6–3 vote, the MPAA granted the film an "exception" conditional on "reduction in the length of the scenes which the Production Code Administration found unapprovable." The exception to the code was granted as a "special and unique case", and was described by The New York Times at the time as "an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent."[63] The requested reductions of nudity were minimal, and the outcome was viewed in the media as a victory for the film's producers.[62] The Pawnbroker was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval. ...
See also https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ix309/e... .
And it happened in Bavaria, not the biggest fans of the Green party, so it‘s a little bit strange that the state attorney went with a raid.
Are they using nsd or bind or … did they write their own?
Surprisingly, thepiratebay.org is available for me though without issues. My previous ISPs here (Movistar, Orange, Jazztel) were all blocking thepiratebay.org
Seems to be pretty hit/miss what exact domains various ISPs block here. I would have imagined the police/courts serve like a centralized .txt file (simplified) the ISPs just fetch once a day or whatever, but seems to be way less organized than that, for better or worse.
I did not go though the details of the proposed Swiss law to be honest so it might be obvious why they are doing that but still why Germany instead of some other place (like Mullvad being in Sweden) ?
Hence, I think Proton's move is really about reducing costs, with the potential Swiss law as an excuse.
Fast forward to today, Americans are pushing you for self censorship through force and denial(if you don’t speak in line with the admin, you will have hard time in your US public sector job or if you want to travel to US) and Europeans find all kind of other ways.
Tough new world order. I used to be advocating for resolution through legal/political means, but now I'm inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control. Nobody wants loose ends. Everyone is terrified of some group of people will do something to them, freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only. The guy who says want to make humans interplanetary species is posing with people detained for traveling on the planet without permission. Just forget about it.
So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.
What a fun way to completely invalidate anyone who doesn't agree with you that "freedom is out of fashion"!
To me, those 2 sentences contradict each other. Doing it through copyright rights, and doing it for money and business sound pretty much the same to me. But you're saying that traditionally one wasn't considered censorship, but the other was considered censorship.
Would you ban all propaganda? Russian propaganda? Propaganda from countries engaged in illegal wars? How many social media or news sites survive? Heck, how many sites that allow comments and user interaction survive?
Yours is the "think of the children" argument, makes you feel warm and fuzzy when it aligns with your interests but you won't have a leg to stand on by the time it's used against you. Banning is just sweeping some of the trash under the carpet. The ones wielding the ban hammer don't care that most of the trash is still out in the open (social media?), they just need to open the door to arbitrary banning. The ones applauding the ban hammer are lacking the same critical thing that would otherwise handle propaganda and misinformation very well: education.
If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack on a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
Meanwhile all the RT type crap is flooding social media under thousands of names. But that's fine as long as enough rubes are tricked into thinking banning one site did anything to solve the propaganda issue.
> just
So... you do both?
You keep trying to make it sound like we are doing "both". In reality we aren't doing the thing that works, and keep doing the thing that doesn't. The proof is that we live in a world with more disinformation on more channels than ever, while education is cratering.
So I guess the question is why are you pretending we're doing something useful about this? Why are you pretending the useless measure we keep applying needs to be applied nonetheless? Who convinced you that banning solves the problem when reality shows things getting worse and that if we pretend we "do both" it's as if we actually did?
We do both, yet it does not work, so I ask the parent, now what do you suggest?
The problem is just getting bigger because 1) we aren't actually doing anything else (real) about it and 2) we even actively allow propaganda and misinformation on so many other channels it's laughable.
I said above, the people doing the banning just need a vehicle to carry their interests and justify their banning powers. Since they don't care about the problem itself, they don't care about any of the real measures that could tackle it. They pick the only one which gives them what they really want: power to arbitrarily control information. Russia is a great excuse today (and honestly, almost throughout their history) but it will be used against you tomorrow.
You don't even have to dig too far to see the exact same type of propaganda freely spread on X or Facebook, where the people actually are. RT is happily active there. Far right Musk is there. Can you even pretend that banning the rt.com site in Germany does anything towards the goal of curbing disinformation?
What's "freedom" mean if not the right to read any publication you want, including (especially!*) media from hostile foreign countries? It's cynical to attack core civil liberties and say that you are doing so in defense of liberty.
*This is the most obvious thing in the world, IMHO, if you look at the general category, and ask yourself what you think about it when the actors are switched around. If China bans its citizens from reading the New York Times (it does), is that a human rights violation—or is it a simple exercise of sovereignty? When North Korea sends people into labor camps for possessing South Korean television shows (it does), is there a colorable case that *their* national security justifies that? Or is that totally out of the question?
One'd have to twist themselves into pretzels to plead exceptionalism for their own country doing anything of this category.
(There's a further subtext that anyone on HN knows how to trivially circumvent such blocks, so, these rules inherently can never apply to HN commenters, ourselves—it's always other people, we'd wish to apply these rules to).
It's been a longstanding part of the fascist playbook to turn the norms of liberalism against itself, advocating for "free speech" when it helps actively amplify their message to audiences, and having no hesitation to abandon those purported principles once in power and able to censor opponents. Poof, there goes your free speech.
Principle agnostic approaches to freedom of expression lead to the collapse of democracies. Happened in Hungary, almost happened in Poland, and it's unfolding in the U.S. The point isn't that these idea's "win" in a marketplace of ideas but that they mobilize violent anti-democratic capacity.
lol the US has had that door removed
It's not what's good for you, it's what's good for them.
It is a tool that entrenches current powers that be, system wise. Who decides what the "common" good is? the one in power.
It also hides societal problems and signals that could be used for policymaking.
The acceptance of censorship honestly scares me, and i grew up on stories of oppressive communist regime - full of censorship, secret police etc.
and frankly, commercial censorship might be even worse - it is a "for profit" enterprise, common good be damned.
and one last thing - even if you fully trust your current government, you're just one elections away from something vastly different. They will have access to the same powers that you've granted them(indirectly, by voting).
But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?
On the other topic, I for one think that censorship of AI generated content and fake news, as well as AI generated ordering of results should be censored. But it's not that easy, and implementing that is an even bigger can of worms.
Besides copyright, especially among Americans, I find that its completely O.K. to censor content it is bad for business. A major one is censorship in order to be advertisement friendly but anything flies, even the guy owns the thing and can do whatever he pleases is good enough for many(slightly controversial).
At the time, Germany had a law censoring insulting comments about foreign heads of state, but that only applied to living ones (and maybe only those in office at the time?) That law was repealed in 2018.
The videos remained blocked in Turkey, but on account of a specific law banning criticism of Ataturk, not copyright.
But CUII is formed by a private oligopoly, with anonymous judges, implementing vague rules, trying to keep secret even what they block. All while limiting what the vast majority of Germans (who don’t know what DNS is) can access on the internet. IMO that’s the issue.
That also happens to be what the people in power would like you to believe.
If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states had voted last fall, none of the lawlessness that we’ve seen this year would have happened. The people telling you that voting is useless are enjoying the fruits of suckers believing them.
The key part being "in a handful of states". There are many states in the country in which your vote is all but meaningless at the federal level. The Electoral College + relentless Gerrymandering that has been done over the past decades ensures that only a small fraction of eligible voters can cast meaningful votes. Makes it much easier to target and propagadandize those smaller groups. We saw it play out with Cambridge Analytica, but there hasn't been another "scandal" of that sort because it's just established practice now. Everyone has their hand in the pot doing the same thing, it's all above belt.
You should still vote, because you can enact change at the local + state levels, but the levers of federal power have been taken from the people.
See? Same facts, but culminating in a call to action based on the premise that is affirmative of the value of democracy. If there was one person who mobilized this way for every ten who gave up in resignation it would be done already. But the battle against hedonic skepticism is hard.
Second, while some states may be unlikely to change their choice of president or senator, the local level matters quite a lot AND that’s where electoral reform will happen. If you don’t like the two party status quo, if you don’t like the electoral college, giving up on voting ensures defeat whereas supporting things like ranked-choice voting or the The National Popular Vote reform.
Taking a step back, I support the ideals (the good ones at least) of what I’d perceived that our country was founded on. I also support the individual people in our police and military, but not the fascist orders that they’re having to fulfill. I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general, I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
This is a predicament, because it’s like you’re driving the bus and a fascist jumps into your lap with a gun to your head and takes the wheel, while he has others put guns to the head of your family and others on the bus. No one asked for this, and I still feel like there are many that believe that there is nothing we can do and that it will take care of itself. But the gerrymandering law that just passed in Texas, on top of everything else that was already in place, is another warning that this won’t go away on its own.
I get what you’re saying about sending people to space, but I think that being able to get off our big rock if we can do so without destroying other life and other places in the universe is worth time and effort. Even natives that lived with the land and life that existed had to move sometimes, life and all that exists physically that has space is to some degree nomadic.
Ha.
Check out "Ordinary Men" by Christopher R. Browning.
I came to a similar conclusion, what happened in the 90s and early 2000s is since the govs had restricted freedom in the physical/real world a lot of young people took refuge in the Internet.
It became harder for an individual to build his own house or start a business, but you could make a website pretty much free from regulations and impediments.
But governments and a lot of interested parties slowly invested the Internet and now we are complaining it sucks. The common Internet and web suck anyway now because it is full of bots, AI generated content, hard to search and you need to prove you are a human every 5 minutes.
We need to create new networks and places just because it is fun and it will take some time for the govs to follow us there: freenet, yggdrasil, alfis, gemini, reticulum, B.A.T.M.A.N, etc.
Censorship is state/company mandated retraction or blockage of certain information. Copyright is state/company mandated blocking of certain forms of expression.
Copyright permits you to publish any idea you so desire, only that you don't plagiarize someone else while doing so. (Which is always possible, as the fair-use doctrine is a thing)
Removal of content due to copyrights is censorship, you are being denied to spread or consume certain content. It's not different than defining that some content is protected with "national security" or however else you define it and then prevent the spread and consumption of it. Same thing, different excuse.
You can use placeholders to see it more clearly, i.e. "This content is X therefore in accordance to the law needs to be removed, failure to do so may lead to prosecution and penalties of Y"
You can replace X with anything, including "copyrighted material", "support for Hamas terrorism", "hate speech", "defamation of our glorious leader","communist propaganda", "capitalist propaganda", "self harm".
If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
I don't want to go into the copyright discussion. The only thing I will tell you is this and I won't follow up: Piracy is not theft, it's something else and removal of content to elevate the claimed harm is still censorship. Other censorship types all claim greater good too, the "good guys" in this digital world are not just the copyright lawyers.
I am not saying this from anti-copyright perspective, I'm not anti-copyright although I have issues with it and IMHO needs a reform.
I think censorship is generally already considered to be any suppression of speech/communication/information. There are forms of censorship that many consider to be fine/justified, like taking down libel or removing inappropriate language in songs played on the radio, but it'd still conventionally be considered "censored".
The threat of 10 years in prison under the DMCA for providing information that lets people jailbreak/repair/reverse-engineer their own devices definitely fits the bill of censorship to me.
> If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
If you see some state/company secret that you weren't supposed to, and the government prevents you communicating about it, I'd say that's a form of censorship. I don't think it can be analogized to stealing an object in a meaningful way.
Indeed, but that's not really what we are talking about with piracy, is it? State secrets and copyrighted material are clearly different things.
Then I think it's on you to provide an alternative definition to the one in the dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship
I'm very curious as to what you think the word means.
The most relevant Merriam Webster definition, which is actually under "censor (verb)", I reproduce here:
> to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable
Piracy is not typically considered bad due to being "objectionable", it is considered bad because many people/societies consider it equivalent to theft. You can obviously stretch the definition of objectionable to mean that, but it is on you to demonstrate that is a reasonable stretch. Blocking out sex scenes from a movie and removing pirated materials are obviously different actions, and this definition clearly refers to the former.
Copyright law is absolutely a justification of and mechanism for censorship.
It may arguably be socially beneficial censorship, but then that's what is claimed by proponents of every basis and means of censorship.
It's tough to imagine what this might look like. I suspect it's too late.
Device attestation is becoming more prevalent, and required for increasingly more functionality. Passkeys are breathing down our necks.
Alternate protocols can only exist if the corporate and governmental powers look the other way. We have Signal and VPNs and BitTorrent and tor, but for how long?
And moreover, does it even matter what protocols we want to use, if most of us use devices that are fully controlled by the tech giants who want to do the censorship?
Ideally you would have good government involvement to enforce traffic neutrality, but that's out the door. I'm sure this has been talked to death but ground level P2P infrastructure is what I would be rooting for.
>the “demagogue” who allows free expression is more of a tyrant than a state who blocks wrongthink
Okay
Communism did not work because it was not communist enough, now democracy is not working because it's not democratic enough. Democracy is the golden calf of westerners. I truly believe that voting rights are hurting more a society than drugs and alcohol.
They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age, but that doesn’t mean it’s not reasonable or important. Blocking propaganda posing as “news” is a stopgap measure, but we can’t do nothing if we want democracy to work.
What does "accurate media" mean?
The fact is, there strictly isn't and strictly never was any such thing.
In fact, it is absolutely impossible to attain something like this.
The moment something gets transcribed, it ceases to be objective and therefore, there never isnt any such thing as "accurate" news.
Any student of history learns this in their first semester.
> They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age
LOL, it was far, far worse before the information age.
True, there was far fewer "official" versions of what actually goes on in the world, but it doesn't mean they were in any way accurate or any less manipulative.
All it takes to check that is to hop from one so-called "free country" to another an compare two mainstream newspapers describing the same event.
The only way you can get a bit close to the actual truth of what's happening is by reading all the opinions, especially the diametrically opposed ones and try to form your own.
(I'm sure there's a more sophisticated way to refer to this fallacy, but my point stands.)
- create a vanity TLD with high renewal fees
- register a bunch of sites that are mirrors of already seized domains
- mention them in enough places they get noticed
- ???
- profit
Also, blocking websites typically doesn't involve ICANN, the infringing website still owns the domain. They just order ISPs in the country to lie on some DNS queries, which is the reason why such blocks are so easy to work around.
Even if they were actually seized, do you think if the police seize a rental car they'll be paying the rental fee until they give it back?
I'm confused because CUII at:
https://cuii.info/en/about-us/
says (translated):
> The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
CUII is saying that they enforce court orders. I guess that language doesn't preclude them from also blocking other sites.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250130115412/https://cuii.info... said
> The Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet (CUII) is an independent body in Germany. It was founded by German internet access providers and copyright holders to objectively examine whether the blocking of access to a given structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany is lawful. When copyright holders submit an application, a review board examines whether the relevant requirements are met. If they are, the review board then recommends a DNS-block of the structurally copyright-infringing website in question. Every recommendation of the review committee must be unanimous and only apply to clear cases of copyright infringement. The recommendation is then forwarded to the German Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railways (Bundesnetzagentur - BNetzA). If the examination by the BNetzA does not reveal any concerns about the DNS-block according to the provisions of the EU Net Neutrality Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2015/2120), the CUII then informs the internet access providers and the applicants accordingly. In such cases, the internet access providers participating in the CUII then block the corresponding domains of the structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany.
related post by the same author, which mentions the current version of the website: https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up
> The CUII now only coordinates blocks between ISPs after a court order. That's it. No more secret votes. No more corporate censorship. The new version of their website says: "The CUII coordinates the conduct of judicial blocking proceedings and the implementation of judicial blocking orders."
I don't get your point.
What is written on the website of some company/organization/... when writing about itself, is what the respective company/organization/... wants you to believe about it. It should be trivial for you to recognize that what this company/organization/... wants you to believe about it can be very different from what you desire to find as truth about it.
It's like if I wrote: "aleph_minus_one is the greatest human that ever lived on earth." Do you now seriously believe that just because I wrote this about myself, it must be the truth?! :-)
(Disclaimer: I have no idea who you are, but you are great nonetheless!)
Even better, do this resolution over Tor.
Doing that would bypass any state level stupidity, inflicted by an oligopoly, state actors, or similar.
But now, I'm seriously considering something better than that.
It's not the government directly, but what is called in German "Flucht ins Privatrecht" [escape into private law], meaning that the government "outsources" such activities to private organizations that are only very indirectly charged by the government (implying that you cannot use public law to sue the government, but you have to sue the respective organization indirectly. Also, since the relationship between the government and the respective organization is very indirect, the politicians can claim that they are not responsible for the organization's wrongdoings - something that is often not easy to disproof).
From https://cuii.info/en/about-us/
The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
zoobab•6h ago
oblio•6h ago
mzajc•6h ago
The issue is that they're not commonly used, and even if that changes, the ISPs can roll out harder-to-bypass censorship methods like SNI inspection or IP blocks.
ACCount37•5h ago
You can't win the war against corporate censorship and malicious anti-freedom politicians through purely technical means. But you can sure make it much harder for them.
Buttons840•5h ago
(I'm not sure why I replied here. I guess I'm saying that establishing some kind of mesh network protocol between all cellphones would be a great addition to those other protocols you mentioned.)
ACCount37•4h ago
eskuero•2h ago
Oh but they can, we are suffering this in Spain every weekend the football league plays.
Tons of Cloudflare IPs sent to a blackhole regardless of how many other non relevant websites are behind.
ratorx•4h ago
DNSSEC gives you the ability to verify the DNS response. It doesn’t protect against a straight up packet sniffer or ISP tampering, it just allows you to detect that it has happened.
DoT/DoH are better, they will guarantee you receive the response the resolver wanted you to. And this will prevent ISP-level blocks. But the government can just pressure public resolvers to enact the changes at the public resolver level (as they are now doing in certain European countries).
You can use your own recursive, and this will actually circumvent most censorship (but not hijacking).
Hijacking is actually quite rare. ISPs are usually implementing the blocks at their resolver (or the government is mandating that public resolvers do). To actually block things more predictably, SNI is already very prevalent and generally a better ROI (because you need to have a packet sniffer to do either).
jeroenhd•1h ago
Of course you will need to configure your DNS server/client to do local validation for this, and at most it'll prevent you from falling for scams or other domain foolery.
jeroenhd•1h ago
For everything else, there's I2P and Tor.
FirmwareBurner•5h ago
tliltocatl•5h ago
uyzstvqs•2h ago
An even easier start, just set up unfiltered encrypted DNS on your devices. E.g. Njalla DNS or Mullvad DNS. Or get a good VPN such as Mullvad.
At the same time, keep voting for privacy. And send letters to your politicians!