5 ms·

The United States should back it's (alleged) principles & help develop & spread liberalizing, anti-authoritarian software, like this. This is still couched as

The United States should back it's (alleged) principles & help develop & spread liberalizing, anti-authoritarian software, like this. This is still couched as consuming media. The stakes are higher, but I'd have us go further: try to allow person to person, group, & broadcast communication in places where the internet is being subverted & blocked. "The Internet interprts censorship as damage and routes around it". -John Gilmore. Alas the current regimes, bith conservative & liberal, are more focused around demanding things of the internet & making up new regulation, bith as a direct threat to letting people operate & maintain presence they would online. It's extremely hard days seeing one of the greatest emerged possibilities in the world- a universal right to speech & connect- clambored over & shouted down like this. Stories like this & others, of helping people see beyond their oppressive regimes, need much bigger celebration & support.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
traceroute66 5y ago
> The United States should back it's (alleged) principles & help develop & spread liberalizing, anti-authoritarian software, like this. Says someone who's clearly never lived in an authoritarian regime. Tell me, how would the US "spread" such software in North Korea ? What do you think will happen to your average North Korean who gets caught with this US-backed anti-authoritarian software ?
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Well, how does such software currently spread in North Korea? And, what do you think will happen to your average North Korean who gets caught with the current non-US-backed anti-authoritarian software? But then when we look deeper, it gets more complicated. Could we make software that is easier to use and harder to detect? Probably. If someone gets caught with it, will they be in more trouble than they would with non-US-backed software that had similar functionality? Very likely. If the time comes when NK figures out how to track it, and more people have it on their phones because we encouraged them, and the hammer comes down on them, but more information got into NK because of this, is that a good trade-off or a bad one? (I'm not even going to propose an answer to that question...) Love your username, by the way.
- rektide 5y ago
  If i had all the answers i'd be doing it. Wifi-p2p, bluetooth-le broadcasts... who knows. We need more trying stuff. This salty snippy rejectionist behavior doesnt help. Being so certain of failure, convincing everyone not to try to improve things, swearing all attempts are futile... dont you see what vaccuous sucking nihilism this is? It's badgering & bullying to have a stance that is so uncompromising, so mightily assured of failure, that phrases "concerns" so demeaningly. There's no room for any possibility that maybe, just maybe, we could make things better, and that: I hard reject as cruel & unsavory. I dont know what happens. Maybe we find some fantastic covert plausible deniability systems- launch the tech as a small payload in every top 10 site on the planet. Maybe NK doesnt end up being a good spot for freedomware. Maybe it helps Russia, or Myanmar. Doing nothing will help no oppressed people ever: that I promise. Lets not be cowards, let's find some principled things to explore & advance, lets try.
  - themacguffinman 5y ago
    Ignorantly pushing random solutions because "we need more trying" can be so much worse than not helping. North Korea and many of these regions pose huge geopolitical problems. The potential gepolitical outcome of a misguided "solution" isn't just that we "will help no oppressed people ever", it is mass destruction & conflict on a global & industrial scale. Deniability based on technicalities and plausibility is really tenuous at the geopolitical level and I think it's outrageously harmful to suggest ignorantly fucking with it, as if the leaders in North Korea and their Chinese allies give two shits about plausibility when they see a coordinated cyberattack from the US aimed at their systems. If you have no idea what you're talking about, please don't try. You are not playing with VC dollars. Otherwise, the US govt is hiring and they're looking for thoughtful and discreet people.
    - rektide 5y ago
      endless miles of gatekeeping, gotcha. i'll make sure i practice my beliefs & my values quietly where no one else might see them. sounds smart. very safe. i am too fearful uncertain & doubtful to share my hopes & ideas of betterment: mission accomplished.
- TremendousJudge 5y ago
  >Tell me, how would the US "spread" such software in North Korea ? Maybe in a way similar to Stuxnet?
- scaramanga 5y ago
  Also, wouldn't they be much more successful trying to spread it in South Korea, where they have considerable political influence (they command its military, they have 30,000 troops stationed there, the intelligence agencies are highly interlinked, the defence ministry is almost literally inside a US army base)? Oh, I think I see the problem now.
lgvln 5y ago
I’m not optimistic, considering the state of democracy in US. It looks like liberalism and democracy is insufficient to counteract the ill effects of capitalism - the transformation of society from a market economy to a market society.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > It looks like liberalism I'm not sure what you mean by "liberalism" in this context, but over here, it's liberalism that has us relying on billionaires to buy media platforms so that we get access to forbidden media.
  - l33t2328 5y ago
    That’s just not true. You can host a web server and share whatever legal media you’d like.
bitwize 5y ago
> "The Internet interprts censorship as damage and routes around it". -John Gilmore. This is one of those old bromides like Postel's law that just doesn't reflect the reality of the situation in the modern world. Today's modern equivalent would be "The net interprets heterodoxy as noise and filters it out." The most recent example being, a guy asked about what it would take to get Twitter's AS depeered for "disruptive activity" after the Musk acquisition: https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages-discussion/2022-April/002299.html https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages-discussion/2022-Ap... It's probably difficult and unpopular among the large telecom firms to do this now, but with the right incentives we may see sites depeered for political reasons in the future.
- rektide 5y ago
  Citing one de-peering request does not scare me. The internet is still a series of dumb tubes, as I see it. I believe in site's rights to maintain themselves as they will, and this is not a contradiction. That's a high-level concern, one the internet infrastructure doesn't notice or care about. You are absolutely correct that things could get shitty. But I see no indicators on my radar right now that the various anti-internet forces that be in the world are at all embraced or accepted: I think we all still see them as enemy of the common good, quite clearly, and foes to fundamental human rights.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    > The internet is still a series of dumb tubes, as I see it. The internet is a series of contractual agreements between large corporate entities that, till now, have provided an interface that is like a series of dumb tubes. Up till now, they have operated on the principle that everybody has the same color money and should therefore receive the same service. However. These days, large corporate entities need to be aligned with the ESG rules established by the major investment banks who provide them with finances and sit on their boards. That includes an obligation to fight back against forces deemed insufficiently progressive, to avoid the rise of another Trump. Nobody wants to be remembered for complicity in the rise of fascism in the USA, like IBM's complicity in the holocaust. If a site on the internet is seen to be a locus for fascist voices, it will soon be acceptable for that site to no longer be on the internet. Better to enter the kingdom with one eye than to be cast with both eyes into Gehenna.
pessimizer 5y ago
The United States doesn't help people in the United States jailbreak their phones.
- Ancapistani 5y ago
  The US also isn’t buying its own citizens guns, but Afghanistan is awash in automatic rifles purchased by the US taxpayer. What’s your point?
- rektide 5y ago
  Alas.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

traceroute66 5y ago

> The United States should back it's (alleged) principles & help develop & spread liberalizing, anti-authoritarian software, like this. Says someone who's clearly never lived in an authoritarian regime. Tell me, how would the US "spread" such software in North Korea ? What do you think will happen to your average North Korean who gets caught with this US-backed anti-authoritarian software ?

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Well, how does such software currently spread in North Korea? And, what do you think will happen to your average North Korean who gets caught with the current non-US-backed anti-authoritarian software? But then when we look deeper, it gets more complicated. Could we make software that is easier to use and harder to detect? Probably. If someone gets caught with it, will they be in more trouble than they would with non-US-backed software that had similar functionality? Very likely. If the time comes when NK figures out how to track it, and more people have it on their phones because we encouraged them, and the hammer comes down on them, but more information got into NK because of this, is that a good trade-off or a bad one? (I'm not even going to propose an answer to that question...) Love your username, by the way.
rektide 5y ago
If i had all the answers i'd be doing it. Wifi-p2p, bluetooth-le broadcasts... who knows. We need more trying stuff. This salty snippy rejectionist behavior doesnt help. Being so certain of failure, convincing everyone not to try to improve things, swearing all attempts are futile... dont you see what vaccuous sucking nihilism this is? It's badgering & bullying to have a stance that is so uncompromising, so mightily assured of failure, that phrases "concerns" so demeaningly. There's no room for any possibility that maybe, just maybe, we could make things better, and that: I hard reject as cruel & unsavory. I dont know what happens. Maybe we find some fantastic covert plausible deniability systems- launch the tech as a small payload in every top 10 site on the planet. Maybe NK doesnt end up being a good spot for freedomware. Maybe it helps Russia, or Myanmar. Doing nothing will help no oppressed people ever: that I promise. Lets not be cowards, let's find some principled things to explore & advance, lets try.
- themacguffinman 5y ago
  Ignorantly pushing random solutions because "we need more trying" can be so much worse than not helping. North Korea and many of these regions pose huge geopolitical problems. The potential gepolitical outcome of a misguided "solution" isn't just that we "will help no oppressed people ever", it is mass destruction & conflict on a global & industrial scale. Deniability based on technicalities and plausibility is really tenuous at the geopolitical level and I think it's outrageously harmful to suggest ignorantly fucking with it, as if the leaders in North Korea and their Chinese allies give two shits about plausibility when they see a coordinated cyberattack from the US aimed at their systems. If you have no idea what you're talking about, please don't try. You are not playing with VC dollars. Otherwise, the US govt is hiring and they're looking for thoughtful and discreet people.
  - rektide 5y ago
    endless miles of gatekeeping, gotcha. i'll make sure i practice my beliefs & my values quietly where no one else might see them. sounds smart. very safe. i am too fearful uncertain & doubtful to share my hopes & ideas of betterment: mission accomplished.
TremendousJudge 5y ago
>Tell me, how would the US "spread" such software in North Korea ? Maybe in a way similar to Stuxnet?
scaramanga 5y ago
Also, wouldn't they be much more successful trying to spread it in South Korea, where they have considerable political influence (they command its military, they have 30,000 troops stationed there, the intelligence agencies are highly interlinked, the defence ministry is almost literally inside a US army base)? Oh, I think I see the problem now.

lgvln 5y ago

I’m not optimistic, considering the state of democracy in US. It looks like liberalism and democracy is insufficient to counteract the ill effects of capitalism - the transformation of society from a market economy to a market society.

commandlinefan 5y ago
> It looks like liberalism I'm not sure what you mean by "liberalism" in this context, but over here, it's liberalism that has us relying on billionaires to buy media platforms so that we get access to forbidden media.
- l33t2328 5y ago
  That’s just not true. You can host a web server and share whatever legal media you’d like.

bitwize 5y ago

> "The Internet interprts censorship as damage and routes around it". -John Gilmore. This is one of those old bromides like Postel's law that just doesn't reflect the reality of the situation in the modern world. Today's modern equivalent would be "The net interprets heterodoxy as noise and filters it out." The most recent example being, a guy asked about what it would take to get Twitter's AS depeered for "disruptive activity" after the Musk acquisition: https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages-discussion/2022-April/002299.html https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages-discussion/2022-Ap... It's probably difficult and unpopular among the large telecom firms to do this now, but with the right incentives we may see sites depeered for political reasons in the future.

rektide 5y ago
Citing one de-peering request does not scare me. The internet is still a series of dumb tubes, as I see it. I believe in site's rights to maintain themselves as they will, and this is not a contradiction. That's a high-level concern, one the internet infrastructure doesn't notice or care about. You are absolutely correct that things could get shitty. But I see no indicators on my radar right now that the various anti-internet forces that be in the world are at all embraced or accepted: I think we all still see them as enemy of the common good, quite clearly, and foes to fundamental human rights.
- bitwize 5y ago
  > The internet is still a series of dumb tubes, as I see it. The internet is a series of contractual agreements between large corporate entities that, till now, have provided an interface that is like a series of dumb tubes. Up till now, they have operated on the principle that everybody has the same color money and should therefore receive the same service. However. These days, large corporate entities need to be aligned with the ESG rules established by the major investment banks who provide them with finances and sit on their boards. That includes an obligation to fight back against forces deemed insufficiently progressive, to avoid the rise of another Trump. Nobody wants to be remembered for complicity in the rise of fascism in the USA, like IBM's complicity in the holocaust. If a site on the internet is seen to be a locus for fascist voices, it will soon be acceptable for that site to no longer be on the internet. Better to enter the kingdom with one eye than to be cast with both eyes into Gehenna.

pessimizer 5y ago

The United States doesn't help people in the United States jailbreak their phones.

Ancapistani 5y ago
The US also isn’t buying its own citizens guns, but Afghanistan is awash in automatic rifles purchased by the US taxpayer. What’s your point?
rektide 5y ago
Alas.