I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27

u could likely also readonable tell if someone would be enabling others via their access without even inspecting the actual traffic

If you are at a stage of "we shoot people on suspicion of them being against The Cause" then indeed, this will not help.

Still, if you are not at that stage, doing something is better than nothing.

You know, based on some people in China has learned building VPN/proxies, the best and cheap way to communicate under surveillance/censorship is to hide it in plain sight. In fact, that's how most these proxy software works.

So no, you don't need sci-fi technology. If you really want to communicate, context-coherent code words though bugged phone line should be enough, at least enough to arrange a meet up.

Also a interesting thought: maybe one day when human invented a device that could listen to quantum communications, we turn it on and ended up detecting a sea of encrypted conversations from another space-time perhaps even an universe just aligned with ours, and the device also experiences unexplained packet loss. That's what I call a plot of a sci-fi story :)

But I generally think that trying to solve social problems with technology is a futile endeavor. Someone will always have violence on their side. And violence is the ultimate weakness.

The network infrastructure makes it possible to exchange privileged information and tunnel it through insecure channels. That is who we do banking on our phones while using the trains wifi (I would still not recommend to do that). Or generally establish VPN connection. Real data privacy is possible without a physical network.

I disagree with the parent, there is an uncensored net. Most people aren't interested in it for convenience but we should be quite happy it exists.

Censorship itself doesn't mean right or wrong, good or bad. It's very likely that you would censor your young kids from watching violent videos of real murders and would consider that a good thing, as an example.

Removing 'illegal' content is censorship in your example. If this is a good or bad thing depends on a great many considerations.

I can't watch soccer highlights from X because all the mods on reddit are sure Elon's evil.

Boomers today would much rather squawk about threatening lawsuits or getting other people to do the work for them. The ones alive today feel confident in their command of the legal system to get what they want. During the 1960s, how many young Boomers and Silent Generation protested against the Civil Rights movement? Literal bombings and terrorism took place. One black family moving into Cicero, IL led to a violent mob of 4,000 people where it was also young Boomers that shouted and held up swastikas and eventually firebombed the building where the family was going to move in, leaving many other residents of the same building out on the street. -- https://allthatsinteresting.com/anti-civil-rights-movement

Yes, there were obviously not the same people protesting against the war in Vietnam. But, to their credit, Boomers used to turn out for protests back when they were 20.

If you asked Boomers this questions when they were 18-25, I expect their opinions would align pretty close to Gen Z in this survey.

Reddit anecdotes and surveys don't currently reflect reality.

The far-right is responsible for *actual* violence by a large margin in recent history. https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/26973-far-left-versu...

Over 80% of real world politically motivated violence between 1990–2020 is from far-right actors. Left-wing violence has increased over the past 5 years, but is still completely dwarfed by right-wing violence.

Now just figure out which of you changed over 16 years.

- [circa 2020] Do you think that the Black Lives Matter protests should be stopped by force?

- Do you think that a police officer should be able to physically prevent burning of the American flag?

etc

> Gen Z is 10x more accepting of violence to suppress speech they object to compared to Boomers.

That is direct result of practicing taboo topics like violence and normalizing them. A lot of effort was put into making them more aggressive, so success. Mostly on the right, contrary to what you are trying to imply. The violence aggression and censorship are much more common there.

Seems like this is a direct result of being more exposed to the internet. I'm not sure it's their fault when they are raised with ipads in their lap and multi-billion dollar corporations are shoving propaganda (both sides) down everyone's throat 24/7. I wonder if boomers and gen x would feel the same if they grew up the same way.

> It seems history really does repeat. People are going to need to experience some authoritarianism to remember why we care so much about free speech.

Not sure making people experience authoritarianism is the best way to make people remember why free speech is important. That seems more extreme than anything I've read on Reddit lately. Surely there are better solutions.

That's a big negatory.

>you publish on your site,

And your site gets a takedown for illegal content, or cops show up at your door and drag you out while beating you.

Life is heavily moderated in a million different ways. What we're talking about this point is just moderation or unjust moderation.

I'll make my position clear: many parties try to influence people, and quite a few of them do so with grave consequences. The swing to extreme right politics cannot be seen separate from internet interference. In the words of the article: it's already not "technology serving people", but rather "controlling" them.

If extreme right (or left) parties come to power, your freedom of speech and privacy is over. So it's either moderate moderation, or authoritarian moderation. And if it's up to me, it's not your choice.

Personally I think the most useful definition for censorship in the context discussed here is *government* censorship. A company offering a product isn't forcing you to engage with it, even if it is a benefit to do so. You cannot in any way evade the oversight of your government without risking criminal penalties. Amazon can deny you their services. The government can deny you your life and freedom.

It's why the 1st Amendment protects us again government control of speech and assembly, but not the censure and pressure of our peers.

This happens, btw, when there are the most rules and heavy-handed moderation. Places that are less moderated, this rarely happens because people will directly call this behaviour out and the moderators are only intervening on important stuff, e.g., threats of violence, illegal material, etc.

"The family had a lot of buffers."

Because this was definitely happening during COVID.

RIP Tumblr

Part of the problem here is there are people that think any kind of censorship or moderation is wrong. I will not make any universal statement about the correctness of their position, but I will make a personal statement about their position. "They are fucking crazy".

Now, every once is a while you need a bit of fucking crazy to shock you out of the position you're in and reassess what position you should hold.

This is some good brainstorming on the matter:

https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/

Was this a serious comment? It made me realise that prior to the Internet, information flow was controlled by journalists or through peer reviewed papers and academic forums. People without advanced education would, generally, be limited to people in their local area.

— <https://kind.social/@wehpudicabok/117317910370913792>

You don't have to like them, 4chan doesn't, but both of them just won for everyone worldwide by proving OFCOM has no right to police others outside their own country.

Awful people exist everywhere regardless of a site documenting what people willingly post. Because this allows others to see past the facade they get a lot of hate and unproven claims believed true. People prefer easy, which is fine, and don't typically verify leading to it being exploited by awful people.

> Not a single journalist seemed willing to do any homework beyond copying the work of other journalists before them. In the end, the “three suicides” caused by Kiwi Farms ended up being two misrepresentations and one uncomfirmed case.

https://destinygg.substack.com/p/keffals-a-case-study-on-int...

>The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it

I can put all kinds of words together that are legitimate uses of language, but that doesn't mean they mean anything or have any ground truth. Determining truth is massively more difficult than saying words.

No? Just like they are not able to reliably tell if a piece of text was LLM written or not aside from by having access to the watermarking that some providers and models intentionally embed in the text.

> If crap is indistinguishable from substance, is it truly crap?

The crap is very very distinguishable. But there is so much of it we have to wade through, and it’s only getting worse.