8 ms·

How long until cloud providers are forced to scan block devices, so you can't even self-host a file erroneously flagged by the ML? (Actually, how long until th

How long until cloud providers are forced to scan block devices, so you can't even self-host a file erroneously flagged by the ML? (Actually, how long until this is integrated with the "security engine" in CPUs, so you can't even hide with encryption? Everyone is talking about on-device voice-recognition and CSAM recognition, but no doubt the copyright lobby is going to push hard for this as well.)

matheusmoreira 5y ago
It hurts me to even think about this. We're headed towards such a bleak future. The only solution I can think of is to kill copyright in order to save computing freedom. Otherwise our computers will eventually no longer be ours.
- version_five 5y ago
  I think there needs to be more work on open source hardware (and the associated fab capabilities to make what people want) in order to preserve computing freedom. I have no idea how to actually do this, but it feels like it should be prioritized
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    I agree. The only reason these "stakeholders" have any leverage at all with which to push this is the fact semiconductor fabrication currently costs billions of dollars. So while it is possible for us to make our own freedom-respecting software, freedom-respecting hardware is out of our reach. Hardware manufacturing is concentrated in the hands of few corporations and those are friendly towards the copyright industry and good targets for government regulation and intervention. Some kind of innovation that lets people fabricate at home is necessary. Just like the free software compiler changed the software world, the free as in freedom fab must do the same for computer hardware. Access to fabrication must somehow be democratized or we'll never be free.
    - foxfluff 5y ago
      Making fabrication accessible would definitely be nice. In the meanwhile, I'd be interested in finding a community that puts "relatively open" hardware to good use. That includes old computers that won't grow antifeatures on their own, but also e.g. microcontrollers. I believe the dual-core 125MHz $1 Raspberry RP2040 is more powerful than my first PC was (although it might have less RAM and unfortunately can't be transparently expanded as far as I know). It's not exactly open hardware but it's well documented, and even the boot rom is open source (that is rare). You don't exactly have lots of integrated peripherals (e.g. ethernet) so it'd be very difficult for them to have some kind of remote backdoor. It's also quite simple to program; a hacker scale operating system is entirely feasible. And that is of course just one of many choices out there. There are far more powerful microcontrollers out there. And by their nature, it's not going to be very easy for the copyright mafia to get their slimy tentacles between you and the core. You'd give up a lot of power but on the other hand, I could buy 500 of them for the price of my laptop. I don't know, maybe we don't need to run everything on a single high performance CPU and could instead have a small cluster; perhaps each chip running its own application? It's definitely not a "ready world" but I see lots of possibilities and am excited for the future of microcontrollers. But I'm also seeing the line between microcontrollers and processors getting blurred.
    - voldacar 5y ago
      You could just use FPGAs. They aren't fast, but your homegrown chips won't be either.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        Those are also fabricated by huge corporations. No guarantee they won't be compromised by industry or government interests.
        foxfluff 5y ago
        True, but it's harder to compromise a fully programmable device. In essence, you'd have to somehow prevent certain kinds of programming while still permitting all the rest. How is the device to know that flipping pin 121 and 122 in a specific pattern is actually clocking bits from a storage device? I think the web is broken (user-hostile) for the same reason. It's been made to support arbitrary programming, and now you have to play this weird cat and mouse game of trying to prevent a particular kind of programming -- that can be used against you -- without breaking all the rest of the web. Google can block your browser because they can run code in your browser. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051512
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    There are people trying to make hardware more open source and user friendly for the average user right now. The Framework laptop, for example, is not a perfect product with DIY silicon but it's well on it's way to open, repairable hardware, open bare iron code, and other user-friendly attributes. It's also quite expensive because by definition such things will always be more expensive. Vote with your wallet and not just your HN post and you'll push the world just the tiniest bit in the direction you want.
  - babycake 5y ago
    For sure, but companies didn't win by building a better product. They won because of copyright laws that helped them to enforce their goal of profits. If we want computing freedom, or in other words: consumer rights, then we need to enact laws that are pro-consumer to ensure an open future. Things like being able to repair our devices were taken away (Apple) and brought semi-back with right-to-repair laws (albeit only proposed atm), ownership of software and your data taken away by online services (Adobe, etc), and lots others. Having open source hardware won't stop companies trying to take control away. We already see Microsoft and their SecureBoot problems with Linux. Or maybe they just won't support those open source machines by refusing to deploy their OS or whatever. Then what audience are you gonna have to make that product successful to become the new standard? Laws are the only way to force everyone to play nice. We can have the nicest open source stack, but that's nothing if companies can just seize them with their own laws.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      > Having open source hardware won't stop companies trying to take control away. We already see Microsoft and their SecureBoot problems with Linux. Or maybe they just won't support those open source machines by refusing to deploy their OS or whatever. Then what audience are you gonna have to make that product successful to become the new standard? We need to get rid of those products and replace them with free software instead. It doesn't even matter if it's better or worse, as long as it's ours. This is the most sensible long term investment since it's the only thing that will truly benefit humanity forever.
- kbrannigan 5y ago
  Load up on usb drives. I mean really when did we suddenly become dependent on cloud services? It's phenomenon that's less than 15 years old.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Won't help me when my computer starts refusing to read copyrighted files because it has decided its real masters are the copyright holders.
    - vorpalhex 5y ago
      Buy hardware you can own. Stop buying Apple products.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        The first and last Apple hardware I bought must have been over 15 years ago, a really thick 80 GB iPod with an actual hard drive inside it. I got rid of the Apple software and installed a custom OS on it. If I remember correctly, it was called rockbox. Now it's unthinkable that an Apple device would let me have this sort of control. What happened to Apple is what will eventually happen to all other manufacturers. They want to own us.
        fsflover 5y ago
        > What happened to Apple is what will eventually happen to all other manufacturers. They want to own us. Not all manufacturers are the same: https://puri.sm/products https://puri.sm/products.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  Do we need to kill copyright? Couldn't we just kill vigilante enforcement of it? Maybe we should make it the law that if you see a copyright violation, your only legal options are (1) nicely ask the infringer to stop voluntarily, or (2) sue.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Copyright is fundamentally a monopoly on data. The very name implies that you can restrict who can copy data, how many copies can be made. Copying data is among the most basic, fundamental computer operations. Therefore all computers are inherently capable of violating copyright, they merely need to be instructed to do so. It's the 21st century and copyright is absolute nonsense. Computers make it seem absurd by trivializing copying to the point artificial scarcity is exposed for the illusion it always was. So in order for copyright to exist in the 21st century, it must be impossible for us to instruct computers to do anything. They must own our computers. They must ensure computers obey them so that they can make it refuse to copy data without approval. We cannot be allowed any control because we can easily subvert their business model. So in this matter it really is us or them. Either the copyright industry loses, or we lose computing freedom and everything hackers stand for will be history. There's also the looming threat of government encryption regulation which faces the exact same problem. I say computers and the internet are jewels of humanity and too important to be compromised by these governments and stakeholders, and I'd sacrifice a thousand copyright industries to keep them alive and free.
    - SR2Z 5y ago
      > It's the 21st century and copyright is absolute nonsense. This is an awful, terrible take. We know that intellectual property is much more artificial than pretty much every other type of property right, but we still want governments to enforce copyright and other IP law because it's a good way to make sure that people have a financial incentive to be creative or do R&D. Copyright needs reform (and many types of DRM need to be banned), but just because you'd gladly sacrifice thousands of industries (how many jobs is that? millions?) to have some ideological purity, it doesn't mean that such a decision would be broadly supported or even in the best interest of society as a whole. Source: work in copyright, have seen firsthand how shitty IP protections can destroy businesses that produce excellent content.
- landemva 5y ago
  The surface is larger than just copyright and includes anything the government can enforce in the name of protecting or preventing ... [children, terrorists, money laundering]. Lobbyists wondering why not slip this into appropriations bill and make MS put this in desktop.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    It's also larger than that; I believe one of the biggest threats to freedom today is complexity. That's why people are so bitter at Mozilla for example, and perhaps to a lesser degree systemd. But it applies to a lot of stuff, for example everyone who complains about GPU drivers on Linux (or "Linux is not there yet" in general) complains because they feel powerless to fix the issues. I'm glad AMD is doing their part but I'd be happier if we didn't need them to. If things weren't so complex, a small group of hackers would "shut up and hack" and fix their grievances and give the community something new to play with. Instead, we've gotten to the point where most people realize that they are too small in face of all the complexity. Then what choices do you have left? Give up, or get bitter and angry because those who have the resources to maintain a browser or Linux distro aren't doing what you want (and eventually you give up anyway because shouting into the void doesn't fix anything). One can go against the grain but they will be left in the dust; I saw lots of bitter Palemoon users who were ignored as the web moved on and sites started breaking on their increasingly outdated Firefox fork. I can't blame those users. It's this same complexity that enables e.g. Google to just block your browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051512 Open standards mean nothing if only one company on earth has the resources to implement them (and they deliberately push out others). Open standards mean nothing if they require you to implement user-hostile, freedom-disrespecting features that enable behavior like above.
    - easrng 5y ago
      Google blocking browsers is understandable, they're trying to stop apps from implementing Sign In with Google in a webview because that's a security issue. (Apps could steal passwords or non-oauth session information) Some actual browsers (mostly built around those same webview tools) got caught up in the blocks too. If they were blocking everything except Chrome, that'd be a different story, but they're not.
- bostik 5y ago
  I don't think we need to kill copyright, but we sure as hell need to control how it's used. To start with, we need to spay and neuter the out of control copyright enforcers, and especially every form of copyfraud. My previous take on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488496
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    I don't entirely disagree with you. I think copyright is insane but it could certainly be made tolerable enough. Most importantly, it needs to have reasonable duration. 5 years is more than enough time for these creators to make their money several times over. I don't think these copyright holders would ever accept anything that reduced their monopoly power though.
    - bostik 5y ago
      I think 5 years is too short. It assumes the creation[tm] will work out of the box and get immediate momentum. Whereas for music and literature it may well take a decade before the thing bubbles up to someone's consciousness. I'd say 20-25 years from first publication would be a good time window. If your creation has not become worth anything in that time, it wasn't timely or of real interest. On the other hand, if a creation[tm] does become part of cultural background, 25 years is more than enough to reap the benefits. And at the end of the term, if something is part of the cultural scenery, it needs to be in public domain no matter what. What a window like that would ensure is that creators can earn royalties over time, but it would prevent the inter-generational rent seeking dynasties. Copyright is supposed to encourage creation, by handing over a strictly temporary monopoly, but also guaranteeing that the monopoly remains short enough to enable culture to evolve.
- belter 5y ago
  We are in the middle of the hostilities, and we can always appreciate if more young idealists, as well as practical and hands-on militias want to join the revolution: "The Coming War on General Computation": http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-computation/ http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-com...
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    I remember that article. Deeply influenced my views on this matter. It's so good to read it once more. So many examples I'd totally forgotten about.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
narrator 5y ago
Gab.com is how to run a service that gets kicked off all cloud providers. They had to build their own bare metal infrastructure. That's right! They use zero cloud infrastructure. No AWS, etc. They even have release announcements about how they've upgraded or bought more servers so things should go faster and they can enable more features and so forth.
- aasasd 5y ago
  Wow, who would've thought that you can run stuff on servers.
rsync 5y ago
"How long until cloud providers are forced to scan block devices, so you can't even self-host a file erroneously flagged by the ML?" If you are using a cloud provider you are not self-hosting. Self hosting means you own the machine.
withinboredom 5y ago
I have an email from myself to myself sent in 2007 in GMail. I can't open the attachment because "it is malicious." It doesn't, just a schematic, but there's no way to tell GMail to let me download it anyway.
- vidarh 5y ago
  Have you tried downloading it via IMAP?
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    No actually. That’s a good idea!
Johnny555 5y ago
If Amazon didn't offer EBS block device encryption (with a key that's ostensibly only accessible to the customer), then customers would just use full disk encryption instead.
blibble 5y ago
client side rot13 to the rescue (... I have actually used this in the past to work around my employer's moronic proxy)

matheusmoreira 5y ago

It hurts me to even think about this. We're headed towards such a bleak future. The only solution I can think of is to kill copyright in order to save computing freedom. Otherwise our computers will eventually no longer be ours.

version_five 5y ago
I think there needs to be more work on open source hardware (and the associated fab capabilities to make what people want) in order to preserve computing freedom. I have no idea how to actually do this, but it feels like it should be prioritized
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  I agree. The only reason these "stakeholders" have any leverage at all with which to push this is the fact semiconductor fabrication currently costs billions of dollars. So while it is possible for us to make our own freedom-respecting software, freedom-respecting hardware is out of our reach. Hardware manufacturing is concentrated in the hands of few corporations and those are friendly towards the copyright industry and good targets for government regulation and intervention. Some kind of innovation that lets people fabricate at home is necessary. Just like the free software compiler changed the software world, the free as in freedom fab must do the same for computer hardware. Access to fabrication must somehow be democratized or we'll never be free.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    Making fabrication accessible would definitely be nice. In the meanwhile, I'd be interested in finding a community that puts "relatively open" hardware to good use. That includes old computers that won't grow antifeatures on their own, but also e.g. microcontrollers. I believe the dual-core 125MHz $1 Raspberry RP2040 is more powerful than my first PC was (although it might have less RAM and unfortunately can't be transparently expanded as far as I know). It's not exactly open hardware but it's well documented, and even the boot rom is open source (that is rare). You don't exactly have lots of integrated peripherals (e.g. ethernet) so it'd be very difficult for them to have some kind of remote backdoor. It's also quite simple to program; a hacker scale operating system is entirely feasible. And that is of course just one of many choices out there. There are far more powerful microcontrollers out there. And by their nature, it's not going to be very easy for the copyright mafia to get their slimy tentacles between you and the core. You'd give up a lot of power but on the other hand, I could buy 500 of them for the price of my laptop. I don't know, maybe we don't need to run everything on a single high performance CPU and could instead have a small cluster; perhaps each chip running its own application? It's definitely not a "ready world" but I see lots of possibilities and am excited for the future of microcontrollers. But I'm also seeing the line between microcontrollers and processors getting blurred.
  - voldacar 5y ago
    You could just use FPGAs. They aren't fast, but your homegrown chips won't be either.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      Those are also fabricated by huge corporations. No guarantee they won't be compromised by industry or government interests.
      - foxfluff 5y ago
        True, but it's harder to compromise a fully programmable device. In essence, you'd have to somehow prevent certain kinds of programming while still permitting all the rest. How is the device to know that flipping pin 121 and 122 in a specific pattern is actually clocking bits from a storage device? I think the web is broken (user-hostile) for the same reason. It's been made to support arbitrary programming, and now you have to play this weird cat and mouse game of trying to prevent a particular kind of programming -- that can be used against you -- without breaking all the rest of the web. Google can block your browser because they can run code in your browser. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051512
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  There are people trying to make hardware more open source and user friendly for the average user right now. The Framework laptop, for example, is not a perfect product with DIY silicon but it's well on it's way to open, repairable hardware, open bare iron code, and other user-friendly attributes. It's also quite expensive because by definition such things will always be more expensive. Vote with your wallet and not just your HN post and you'll push the world just the tiniest bit in the direction you want.
- babycake 5y ago
  For sure, but companies didn't win by building a better product. They won because of copyright laws that helped them to enforce their goal of profits. If we want computing freedom, or in other words: consumer rights, then we need to enact laws that are pro-consumer to ensure an open future. Things like being able to repair our devices were taken away (Apple) and brought semi-back with right-to-repair laws (albeit only proposed atm), ownership of software and your data taken away by online services (Adobe, etc), and lots others. Having open source hardware won't stop companies trying to take control away. We already see Microsoft and their SecureBoot problems with Linux. Or maybe they just won't support those open source machines by refusing to deploy their OS or whatever. Then what audience are you gonna have to make that product successful to become the new standard? Laws are the only way to force everyone to play nice. We can have the nicest open source stack, but that's nothing if companies can just seize them with their own laws.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > Having open source hardware won't stop companies trying to take control away. We already see Microsoft and their SecureBoot problems with Linux. Or maybe they just won't support those open source machines by refusing to deploy their OS or whatever. Then what audience are you gonna have to make that product successful to become the new standard? We need to get rid of those products and replace them with free software instead. It doesn't even matter if it's better or worse, as long as it's ours. This is the most sensible long term investment since it's the only thing that will truly benefit humanity forever.
kbrannigan 5y ago
Load up on usb drives. I mean really when did we suddenly become dependent on cloud services? It's phenomenon that's less than 15 years old.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Won't help me when my computer starts refusing to read copyrighted files because it has decided its real masters are the copyright holders.
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    Buy hardware you can own. Stop buying Apple products.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      The first and last Apple hardware I bought must have been over 15 years ago, a really thick 80 GB iPod with an actual hard drive inside it. I got rid of the Apple software and installed a custom OS on it. If I remember correctly, it was called rockbox. Now it's unthinkable that an Apple device would let me have this sort of control. What happened to Apple is what will eventually happen to all other manufacturers. They want to own us.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        > What happened to Apple is what will eventually happen to all other manufacturers. They want to own us. Not all manufacturers are the same: https://puri.sm/products https://puri.sm/products.
josephcsible 5y ago
Do we need to kill copyright? Couldn't we just kill vigilante enforcement of it? Maybe we should make it the law that if you see a copyright violation, your only legal options are (1) nicely ask the infringer to stop voluntarily, or (2) sue.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Copyright is fundamentally a monopoly on data. The very name implies that you can restrict who can copy data, how many copies can be made. Copying data is among the most basic, fundamental computer operations. Therefore all computers are inherently capable of violating copyright, they merely need to be instructed to do so. It's the 21st century and copyright is absolute nonsense. Computers make it seem absurd by trivializing copying to the point artificial scarcity is exposed for the illusion it always was. So in order for copyright to exist in the 21st century, it must be impossible for us to instruct computers to do anything. They must own our computers. They must ensure computers obey them so that they can make it refuse to copy data without approval. We cannot be allowed any control because we can easily subvert their business model. So in this matter it really is us or them. Either the copyright industry loses, or we lose computing freedom and everything hackers stand for will be history. There's also the looming threat of government encryption regulation which faces the exact same problem. I say computers and the internet are jewels of humanity and too important to be compromised by these governments and stakeholders, and I'd sacrifice a thousand copyright industries to keep them alive and free.
  - SR2Z 5y ago
    > It's the 21st century and copyright is absolute nonsense. This is an awful, terrible take. We know that intellectual property is much more artificial than pretty much every other type of property right, but we still want governments to enforce copyright and other IP law because it's a good way to make sure that people have a financial incentive to be creative or do R&D. Copyright needs reform (and many types of DRM need to be banned), but just because you'd gladly sacrifice thousands of industries (how many jobs is that? millions?) to have some ideological purity, it doesn't mean that such a decision would be broadly supported or even in the best interest of society as a whole. Source: work in copyright, have seen firsthand how shitty IP protections can destroy businesses that produce excellent content.
landemva 5y ago
The surface is larger than just copyright and includes anything the government can enforce in the name of protecting or preventing ... [children, terrorists, money laundering]. Lobbyists wondering why not slip this into appropriations bill and make MS put this in desktop.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  It's also larger than that; I believe one of the biggest threats to freedom today is complexity. That's why people are so bitter at Mozilla for example, and perhaps to a lesser degree systemd. But it applies to a lot of stuff, for example everyone who complains about GPU drivers on Linux (or "Linux is not there yet" in general) complains because they feel powerless to fix the issues. I'm glad AMD is doing their part but I'd be happier if we didn't need them to. If things weren't so complex, a small group of hackers would "shut up and hack" and fix their grievances and give the community something new to play with. Instead, we've gotten to the point where most people realize that they are too small in face of all the complexity. Then what choices do you have left? Give up, or get bitter and angry because those who have the resources to maintain a browser or Linux distro aren't doing what you want (and eventually you give up anyway because shouting into the void doesn't fix anything). One can go against the grain but they will be left in the dust; I saw lots of bitter Palemoon users who were ignored as the web moved on and sites started breaking on their increasingly outdated Firefox fork. I can't blame those users. It's this same complexity that enables e.g. Google to just block your browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051512 Open standards mean nothing if only one company on earth has the resources to implement them (and they deliberately push out others). Open standards mean nothing if they require you to implement user-hostile, freedom-disrespecting features that enable behavior like above.
  - easrng 5y ago
    Google blocking browsers is understandable, they're trying to stop apps from implementing Sign In with Google in a webview because that's a security issue. (Apps could steal passwords or non-oauth session information) Some actual browsers (mostly built around those same webview tools) got caught up in the blocks too. If they were blocking everything except Chrome, that'd be a different story, but they're not.
bostik 5y ago
I don't think we need to kill copyright, but we sure as hell need to control how it's used. To start with, we need to spay and neuter the out of control copyright enforcers, and especially every form of copyfraud. My previous take on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488496
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  I don't entirely disagree with you. I think copyright is insane but it could certainly be made tolerable enough. Most importantly, it needs to have reasonable duration. 5 years is more than enough time for these creators to make their money several times over. I don't think these copyright holders would ever accept anything that reduced their monopoly power though.
  - bostik 5y ago
    I think 5 years is too short. It assumes the creation[tm] will work out of the box and get immediate momentum. Whereas for music and literature it may well take a decade before the thing bubbles up to someone's consciousness. I'd say 20-25 years from first publication would be a good time window. If your creation has not become worth anything in that time, it wasn't timely or of real interest. On the other hand, if a creation[tm] does become part of cultural background, 25 years is more than enough to reap the benefits. And at the end of the term, if something is part of the cultural scenery, it needs to be in public domain no matter what. What a window like that would ensure is that creators can earn royalties over time, but it would prevent the inter-generational rent seeking dynasties. Copyright is supposed to encourage creation, by handing over a strictly temporary monopoly, but also guaranteeing that the monopoly remains short enough to enable culture to evolve.
belter 5y ago
We are in the middle of the hostilities, and we can always appreciate if more young idealists, as well as practical and hands-on militias want to join the revolution: "The Coming War on General Computation": http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-computation/ http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-com...
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  I remember that article. Deeply influenced my views on this matter. It's so good to read it once more. So many examples I'd totally forgotten about.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

narrator 5y ago

Gab.com is how to run a service that gets kicked off all cloud providers. They had to build their own bare metal infrastructure. That's right! They use zero cloud infrastructure. No AWS, etc. They even have release announcements about how they've upgraded or bought more servers so things should go faster and they can enable more features and so forth.

aasasd 5y ago
Wow, who would've thought that you can run stuff on servers.

rsync 5y ago

"How long until cloud providers are forced to scan block devices, so you can't even self-host a file erroneously flagged by the ML?" If you are using a cloud provider you are not self-hosting. Self hosting means you own the machine.

withinboredom 5y ago

I have an email from myself to myself sent in 2007 in GMail. I can't open the attachment because "it is malicious." It doesn't, just a schematic, but there's no way to tell GMail to let me download it anyway.

vidarh 5y ago
Have you tried downloading it via IMAP?
- withinboredom 5y ago
  No actually. That’s a good idea!

Johnny555 5y ago

If Amazon didn't offer EBS block device encryption (with a key that's ostensibly only accessible to the customer), then customers would just use full disk encryption instead.

blibble 5y ago

client side rot13 to the rescue (... I have actually used this in the past to work around my employer's moronic proxy)