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Ask HN: Is it technically possible to evade big-tech censorship?

• threatofrain 6y ago
  It's not just tech companies which are cancelling. By Parler's own admission from their CEO, banks and payment providers, logistics, and law firms are cancelling on Parler. And friends and acquaintances too, I imagine.
• BitwiseFool 6y ago
  I've been looking at this situation in practical terms. There are all sorts of ways to communicate online even when big tech does not want you to. The problem is that these solutions do not scale. Big Tech alternatives are also notoriously obscure and/or hard to use for the average person. Additionally, running any service in the modern day involves dozens of third party companies. Even if you solve the technology problem there is nothing stopping the bank from closing your account. What about your accounting firm, choice of payroll software, or even the landlord? All of these links in the chain are easily intimidated into cutting you off. What happens if someone sues you? We've already seen legal firms refuse to represent Parler. I really don't see a way out of this situation, to be honest.
• cbm-vic-20 6y ago
  The President of the United States has the same venue for disseminating information as his predecessors: White House press conferences. As for the five people you mentioned, the CEOs of the "big tech" firms, are not one entity- you've got to go well beyond the pale (as has happened in the past week) to get them all to agree that it is their company's best interest to deplatform you.
  • whymauri 6y ago
    >The President of the United States has the same venue for disseminating information as his predecessors: White House press conferences. Pretty much. The President has had access to the bully pulpit for over a hundred years. The decision to rely so heavily on Twitter instead of traditional channels is a strategic failure of the Trump administration. Normalizing this and ceding control of presidential communications to private parties might be a lasting legacy and mistake.
    • Nbox9 6y ago
      Would he have gotten so far in politics without Twitter? Trump’s style of direct communication is very powerful for maintaining the attention of a passionate base which is the source of his political power.
      • whymauri 6y ago
        I think this discounts the power of Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting. I agree it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, though.
      • geofft 6y ago
        Yes, that's the tradeoff he chose. Neither Twitter the company nor society at large is obligated to play into the game where a candidate figures pit how to make a non-traditional platform work for him and then expects help from others when it no longer works for him. You can't live by the sword and then passionately advocate pacifism when a sword is raised against you.
  • 6y ago
• davismwfl 6y ago
  Honestly I doubt there is. So if you co-located in a large ISP, you will still sign a contract which most of the time they put it very generic morality clause for types of content so they can pull your service at a moments notice. So even assume you had enough money to get the infrastructure you need to plug into the net, and you usually do this via co-locating and buying net access. Only way I can think of right now is you'd literally have to go the the length of setting up your own first tier ISP (like Google, Facebook etc do), which is doable but not cost effective. Cause outside of that you are either running on someones cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) or you are running under a contract of an ISP that has similar terms. Maybe I am missing another avenue, though, always possible.
  • BitwiseFool 6y ago
    This is an excellent point. Every ToS has clauses in it which can easily be interpreted against you.
  • ars 6y ago
    > your own first tier ISP And if other ISP's refuse to peer with you? Maybe we need another kind of law, above and beyond 230, requiring large ISP's and cloud providers to act as common carriers in exchange for certain protections. I don't have a fixed concept on the details here, it's just an idea I had. Think about this: Does Google have a legal or moral right (or responsibility) to delete emails calling for specific and actionable violence against someone? Or is email too private for that?
    • walkedaway 6y ago
      > Does Google have a legal or moral right (or responsibility) to delete emails calling for specific and actionable violence against someone? Or is email too private for that? This is the rathole we're in. If someone does plan over gmail, does all of gmail get shut down? What about the ISP that served it? If someone plans a violent attack over the phone, does a company's phone network get shutdown? How far are we willing to go for our rights and privacy?
      • 6y ago
• JshWright 6y ago
  I'm not sure "don't incite a violent mob" qualifies as a technical approach, but it seems likely to meet your requirements here.
• tantalor 6y ago
  The "dark web"?
  • kawfey 6y ago
    I was going to mention tor, but it too isn't a very scalable service and can be (almost) just as easily taken down by disgruntled hosts or government sanctions.
• webXL 6y ago
  Hacker News needs a black bar across the top while this assault on Free Speech continues. First they came for the Trump supporters, I said nothing...
  • pjc50 6y ago
    First they came for the Nazis, and I said "acutally this is great for the Jews, socialists, trade unionists etc" and we don't have to do the rest of the poem.
    • webXL 6y ago
      Using Nazi tactics to defeat Nazis makes you consider the rest of their fascist ideology: total state control. 1984
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  • db48x 6y ago
    First they came for the Trump supporters, and we all got downvoted :)
  • dumbfoundded 6y ago
    When they came for the nazis, I said nothing for I was not a nazi. Then they came for the ku klux klan but I said nothing for I was not a member. And then they never came for me because I do not use violence to achieve my political goals aka the definition of terrorism. A society of tolerance can only exist if it's intolerant to intolerance. It's really simple. Our grandparents would be ashamed of those of us who say we should make sure the nazis have a platform in the name of free speech. I know at least my nazi killing grandfather would be.
    • webXL 6y ago
      Here's something even simpler: Trump supporters might try to do the same to you if they get power again. These are Nazi tactics being used by the Left.
• pjc50 6y ago
  Yes, by remaining small-tech. It's basically like how the US keeps airstriking "the leader of Al-Quaeda" every six months. If you're high profile enough, and causing trouble to enough people, eventually it will come back to you. Trying to overthrow the Senate is evidently the line you can't cross.
• ardy42 6y ago
  > But when he goes to another network (Parler) it's shut down with 24hrs notice by Amazon. To anyone who's the least bit of a political dissident, alarm bells should be screaming in your ears. If a handful of tech execs can (and will) do this to the US president, what chance would you stand against them, or anyone, if they want to silence you? Your question is weirdly lacking in context. There was an attack on Congress, whose nastiest bits were openly planned on Parler. It's not like these companies just suddenly decided to cut ties because they didn't like Trump's views. They've actually been extremely tolerant of him, giving him policy exceptions left and right (e.g. if he wasn't the president, he'd probably have been banned from Twitter years ago). > Would it be possible to host your political views on any commercial hosting vendor in this case? Is running a server at home enough, assuming you can avoid DOS somehow? Would you have to start your own ISP, and if so, could your ISP be kicked off the backbone? > I'm interested in this as a technical (not political) question: is there any way to speak online if big tech decides they don't want you to? Obviously, yes. Donald Trump has a website (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/ https://www.donaldjtrump.com/), and it's still up. He can speak online there.
• Meekro 6y ago
  Here's an idea I've been playing with: you can buy your own AS and small IP block for a few thousand dollars. There are many data centers that will give you BGP access to then announce that IP range and route it to your servers. The result will be that whois tools will not actually report which data center you're in, but will report "Uncensorable Inc" or whatever you choose to call yourself. No one will know which company to tweet at to try to have you deplatformed. I'll be trying to do this to see if it works, if I succeed I'll post a story or two here with a demo and how-to instructions.
  • geofft 6y ago
    Wouldn't people just tweet at the companies offering you peering? Or put another way - if this works, why haven't spammers done it?
    • Meekro 6y ago
      As I understand it, hosts tend to have AUPs that restrict speech more than the first amendment does, but peering arrangements don't do the same-- correct me if I'm wrong, though! There are data centers that are popular with hax0rs because they don't validate source IP on outbound packets, thereby allowing people to run reflection DDoS attacks. You can visit hacker forums and get a list of these. There are still a ton of AS's in the world doing this, and no one is unpeering them even though they do huge damage to core infrastructure. On the other hand, if you try that on a well-policed data center like AWS, you'll be either blocked by automated tools or dropped as a customer (or both). That illustrates the difference between how customers are treated and how peers are. Spam is a bit different because email providers just block IPs and AS's that are major spammers. This is done with a simple firewall policy and has nothing to do with peering.
  • rubatuga 6y ago
    Well, not terribly hard to find the two upstream ASNs and figure out where the datacentres are.
• rvz 6y ago
  Yes. Self-host like how 4chan and Gab are doing it. Although its easier said than done, but when they're constantly de-platformed from the face of the internet; they're left with no other choice but to self-host.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The implications of Trump being disappeared from the modern internet Trump has not been disappeared from the modern internet. He controls, for instance, a very significant online presence here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/ He also controls a broader presence through a number of subordinates, see, e.g.: https://www.usa.gov https://www.usa.gov and the whole list at https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies And, in his (unusual for a President) parallel life, he also controls a web presence through his private business (delegated to subordinates headed by immediate family members): https://www.trump.com/ https://www.trump.com/
• rohit89 6y ago
  Not sure what I am missing here but the obvious answer is an offshore host right?
• m0llusk 6y ago
  This is an inherently political question where the context is critical. If you are working with North Koreans on detailed plans for disruption of infrastructure for example then you would encounter a different alarms and enforcement than a biotech researcher doing gene splicing experiments. Email lists are extremely easy to set up, make robust, and transfer as necessary, so using tech like that to simply skip around big tech might be an alternative.
• geofft 6y ago
  As a technical question: no, if everyone you want to peer with wants to kick you off, you can't be on the "internet" in the regular sense. Signal was funded by Radio Free Asia, which historically got past the general form of this problem by broadcasting radio stations from right outside the borders of a hostile country. St. Maximilian Kolbe did the same with amateur radio. I think the more interesting question is some blend of technical and political: how do you get across an idea that people aren't exposed to? Radio Free Asia/Europe/etc. and Kolbe all faced this problem, as did the samizdat publishers, the organizers of the Underground Railroad, etc. You have to be creative, but it turns out that getting ideas across is not an unsolved technical problem, it just requires a bit of work. If the goal is to make people aware that an alternative to your authoritarian government exists or that an organized scheme to take you to freedom exists, you can communicate it, even without anyone else's infrastructure. Neither the purpose nor the effect of Trump's ban is to prevent people from knowing that his ideas exist. They are well-known and popular. It denies him the use of mass media (and even so, newspapers and TV stations haven't banned him), and it disrupts the ability of people to coordinate. Regardless of the merits of the ban, I think it's pretty clear this is a different sort of problem, and yes, if you want to use wide-reaching, high-bandwidth, reliable infrastructure that other people built, you need to make them okay with you using the infrastructure. An analogy can be made to spam. Obviously everyone knows that you can lose money by wiring it to some random dude with a foreign bank account; the "censorship" of 419 scams does not in any way restrict what people know about, and spammers get denied the use of infrastructure if they make the people who built the infrastructure unhappy. In terms of technical means, I'm not sure how to permit an existing, major political party to have access to infrastructure however they want without also, by implication, permitting spammers to have access to that same infrastructure however they want. The only distinction between those is human judgment.
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Is running a server at home enough, assuming you can avoid DOS somehow? If your content was lawful, and if the Trump Administration had not repealed net neutrality, it would be enough legally. It wouldn’t be enough technically if your ISP opposed you. > Would you have to start your own ISP, and if so, could your ISP be kicked off the backbone? As a technical and not a legal/contractual matter, yes, you could be kicked off by whoever you connected to directly. You’ve claimed that you are asking a technical rather than political question, but virtually all of your specific examples seem framed as legal questions as obviously any connection to a third party can, as a technical matter, be abandoned by the third party.
• idlewords 6y ago
  The technology you're asking about is called a blog, and there are myriad ways to host one. The thing that's harder to do if big tech is gunning for you is to maintain an audience of millions, and get paid for that traffic. But you can put your manifesto up anywhere you want.
• dumbfoundded 6y ago
  It's almost like people don't understand that private companies don't have to guarantee free political speech, especially to nazis.
  • MrRiddle 6y ago
    I’ve seen a lot more racism fueled violence on BLM protests than with Trump supporters.
    • dumbfoundded 6y ago
      I believe all people calling for any sort of violence on social media should be deplatformed.
      • Domenic_S 6y ago
        That teaches them nothing and gives them a martyr complex. Put them in $social_network jail for some length of time and teach them what is and isn't allowed.
        • dumbfoundded 6y ago
          As long as we agree the correct response isn't inaction.
          • MrRiddle 6y ago
            Exactly, there definitely shouldn't be inaction. However, after BLM protests I've seen action only towards one side, which is exactly what led us here in the first place.
      • BitwiseFool 6y ago
        I can understand this point of view, but will the same standard be applied to anyone who advocates punching Nazis?
• tootie 6y ago
  It is currently very possible to host absolutely any political views on big tech platforms with no repercussions. Conservative media, libertarian media, communist media, scientology media are all proliferating like never before. What you can't do is incite violence or direct hatred at groups based on their innate character. At least, not with impunity. Shutting down Trump is not at all an unprecedented move. Social media shuts out evil world leaders all the time.
• baiyz 6y ago
  Just like P2P bitcoin, can any big tech shut down bitcoin globally? Can someone develop some chat services based on HTTP/3, WebAssembly and P2P like bitcoin? Also Zero Knowledge Technology needs to be utilized.
• hellisothers 6y ago
  When one says “big tech” I think it’s usually used to represent Twitter, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc “big SV FAANG’y tech”. This seems like controlling content the same way large media outlets always have (ie newspapers, magazines, etc), they have no obligation to amplify your message. You can still take your message to a smaller player if they’ll have you (ie a smaller newspaper) or if your message isn’t wanted by others at all you still have your own machine in a closet (ie a printing press and pamphlets).
• motohagiography 6y ago
  I'd argue the only meaningful online social network is git, and maybe soundcloud/bittorrent, the rest is just somebody elses variable source of narcissistic supply. You could use one of those p2p-blockchain messengers to talk to other people who use p2p-blockchain messengers, but then you are talking to people who use p2p-blockchain messengers. It's really a question of how much breadth you want/need. The internet itself reduces to a politically atomized individual sitting alone at a keyboard, struggling to connect, while being neutralized from all sides by random noise to stimulate both outrage and helplessness. It really is the totalitarian dream. You'd have to leave The Internet proper as we know it now, and create the next one, just as AOL/Compuserve were walled gardens that the internet grew outside of, a new network that resembled the 90's era internet could emerge in as little as a few years. Think about what Linux was: a new kernel for bare metal that broke out of the constraints of an OS landscape that looked a lot like today's internet giants. At the time, global communication was novel, today, privacy and regional networks are novel. Most linux users had a bsd/solaris/windows machine to connect to the legacy world, so you don't have to design the whole thing at once. A p2p-reddit that used a blockchain that operated with a kind of old fidonet/UUCP/nntp over bittorrent as transport could be a source of new community. A bare metal blockchain client kernel for open RISC and ARM processors that uses a wireless mesh, and includes a kind of regional pub/sub pattern would do it. The tech is there.
• johncoltrane 6y ago
  Move the discussion offline. The state can still get to you but at least you will mostly be out of big tech's reach.
• walkedaway 6y ago
  I'm troubled as well. Here's how I see things that played out: Twitter and Facebook banning Trump? Not surprised, they censor conservatives all the time and have been doing so since even before Trump. Also remember: it wasn't just Trump this time, many others have been banned from Twitter and Facebook, and many groups have been shut down. Apple banning Parler? I was surprised by this. Apple is supposedly about privacy; clearly, they are not. Changes my view on their value proposition moving forward. AWS dropping Parler? Again, this is surprising. Head scratching even. Going to make a lot of people think twice about AWS. I'm also kinda surprised at the HN response to all this, perhaps its because many of the posters here work at one of these Orwellian companies and don't see the issue. I see complaints here about payments companies blocking criminal activity, yet very little relative objections to simply cancelling people the CEOs disagree with.
• Yetanfou 6y ago
  First of all, sad to see you start your post with that Trump-disavowment, it makes me wonder whatever happened with the willingness to defend other's right to free speech no matter whether the defender agrees with that speech or not. As to the possibility to evade censorship the answer depends on how censorious tech really gets. Evading customer-facing Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft is not that hard, all it takes it not to use their services - I don't, for one. That is level 1, easily beaten. Level 2 is what Amazon just did to Parler in that they terminated their hosting contract and with that - due to Parler's lack of robustness - taking it off the 'net. They complain that they can not use any of the other hosting providers since all those big enough to host them are unwilling to take their business, I don't know whether this is true or not but being refused back-end services is the essence of level 2 of the cancellation scale which I just made up. To take Parler as an example I'd suggest they could just buy some servers, hook them up to a power supply and get a few speedy connections to the 'net to be back in business... until those IAPs start refusing to offer them connectivity. That would be level 3, more or less. There are many IAPs and it is hard to see how all of them would be unwilling to provide connectivity so even that type of cancellation would be circumventable... until ISPs start blocking their user's access to your services. They can do that clumsily by blocking DNS requests, they can do it in a more thorough way by blocking actual connectivity by blocking your IP ranges (remember that you are using your own hardware at this time so you won't be sharing IP space with others). The more tenacious ISPs can start blocking any and all access, even for those who are smart enough to use proxies to get around the IP blocks by using DPI to examine what those pesky customers are doing. Such ISPs should get their feet grilled by the likes of the EFF but as to whether that would happen remains to be seen. Be that as it may, this is more or less level 4. Level 5 would be a similar DPI treatment by backbone providers, blocking any and all access through regular means. This would be horrendously inefficient, expensive and invasive so I don't know whether this is a realistic scenario. And then, after all that cancelling and blocking frenzy... you get to launch your services on top of IPFS or a similar dark network. If your service is popular people will flock to it. If IPFS does not cut it there are other dark networks, all with their own pros and cons. As long as there is a way to pass traffic from customer A to customer B there is a way to create a digital Samizdat, it won't be fast but it will work. You won't be streaming video, you won't be proclaiming the revolution in a live 4K stream but you will be able to reach your targets.
• hndecaythrw235 6y ago
  Wait, seriously, why the hell is this flagged? We've had weeks now, of blatantly "Front page mainstream news political debating" flooding the front page, and yet one of the first technically focused takes on that, that to my eyes would be PRECISELY the question a "hacker" (in the traditional HN sense) would ask when confronted with this situation is flagged? @dang, I'm sure you can identify who my real account is, and I will ask your forgiveness and understanding as to why I avoid any of these topics (or making this post) under that alias, so please take this as a plea from a typically moderate source that this is all going very unproductive and disappointing directions. That every answer here is, "you can't", sidetracking into political arguments on the same tired quotes, or just blatant greying? We've GOT to be better than this. Why aren't we discussing scihib? Why aren't we discussing bittorrent? Why aren't we discussing IPFS? Why aren't we discussing advanced forms of sneaker/mesh nets? I will gladly hold myself to this standard: I think we have seen the technical approach we need; we need to start thinking about ideological and centrally controlled platforms as points-of-failure in the same way we used to think about datacenters or network uplinks. Straddle technologies. Provide fallbacks. Build your core indexes on technologies that cannot be deplatformed readily, or are not cross-correlated in their deplatforming tendencies. The is insane. I've been on this board over a decade, used to have such high respect for the level of discussion. Please; please; I honestly beg of you all as one human to another hoping to pull back from our current mode of dialogue. Is anyone else in the room able to bring a steady keel back into these discussions?
• tzs 6y ago
  > He's a sitting world leader, but Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos, Cook and Pichai snap their fingers and he is effectively erased from the internet almost overnight. What are Bezos, Cook, and Pichai doing in that list? None of them have done anything that hampers Trump's ability to reach his internet audience. Trump reached his internet audience via Twitter, Facebook, and the websites of Fox, Newsmax, and OANN. He either did not post on or only rarely posted on Parler.
• Youden 6y ago
  Yes, use tools that are specifically designed for censorship-resistance like Tor, Freenet or I2P. If you ensure that nobody knows who hosts your servers, you can even continue to host them at the big cloud providers.
• Arriz 6y ago
  He can just call traditional media (like FOX news) and talk to them on camera
• Arriz 6y ago
  He can just have a press conference He can call FOX news for instance, they love him
• tpoacher 6y ago
  Nice try, Donald!
• athriren 6y ago
  youre asking this question on the same medium by which you can access torrents and nearly any journal article for free on platforms that have repeatedly evaded authority’s attempts to shut them down entirely. if the right wing wants to self-host, they’re able to. the “oh facebook, the platform my grandma uses to keep up with her knitting tutorials and oprah’s book club recommendations, kicked me off” is such an anti-hacker attitude, in my view. the people who built AWS were not able to upstream all their issues to some other platform. the people building the open web in the 90s and early aughts didnt need to spin up docker images on someone else’s hardware. there is a ton of money for this, if the mass of users want it then the market should be able to provide it, i believe
• MaoTheMeow 6y ago
  As a (lgbt)"right winger" (became one when CNN publicly blackmailed a minor for a 4chan meme that wasn't even anything special and ghen publicly doxxed him in 2016): Media has always been like this against the right. There is a reason why centrists and others call left wing authoritarianists "useful idiots" because they are endorsed by huge companies and used as a tool by them to gather profits or drive other companies out of buisnesses or use them to push harmful legislature. Honestly i wasn't expecting to see people wearing hammers and sickles and advocating for pogroms on their political enemies to ever side with monopolies and the bourgeoisie but here we are. No matter where you go you are already on a list(proudly supported by Pelosi and AOC) and if not already then soon you will be visited by antifa with molotovs and if you defend yourself you will be used as justification for further assault. There is nowhere to go, there is nowhere to hide, your own child is ready to sell you out for a penny, there is no place safe and my lord if you are LGBT you are hated even more by everyone. Probably the safest place would be telegram but its about as safe as pills from mexico. Oh yes when the opposing political party is in power have fun making your own ISP. You asked this as a technical not political question but the question is rooted in politics entirely. TLDR; No. Since 2015~ there is no place left. Congrats you won.
• jascha 6y ago
  I think there are a lot of things that can be referred to as options to avoid your ISP from dropping you. But when your service is spending over $100k a month on an AWS bill like Parler claims to have been you are scaled up enough to need a lot of power, bandwidth, and storage to recreate that infrastructure. There are a lot of P2P and blockchain decentralized (or mostly) people could try to use. But the main issue with them is how tech savvy need to be to even access them. Most of the things in this example list require deeper understanding than most Parler users probably have. https://github.com/gdamdam/awesome-decentralized-web https://github.com/gdamdam/awesome-decentralized-web Even something as simple as DNS can be blocked or altered by the registrar or provider(s). So you need to have a top down solution to all the various potentialities.