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No, we shouldn't arbitrarily cut off millions of people from communication because some westerners have bought into a new red scare. That's ridiculous and child
by DoItToMe81 3y ago
No, we shouldn't arbitrarily cut off millions of people from communication because some westerners have bought into a new red scare. That's ridiculous and childish.
- hackinthebochs 3y agoWhen that country is fomenting unrest in the west through various means utilizing the internet, why should the west allow themselves to remain at the mercy of these operations? Liberal principles should not be a suicide pact.
- pphysch 3y agoThe idea that this or that Big Bad state is fomenting significant unrest in the West is a false narrative manufactured to scapegoat from domestic mismanagement and distract from the fact that Washington hosts a massive global industry dedicated to destabilizing states, especially those Big Bad ones, via organizations like GEC, NED, USAGM, USAID, etc.
- filoleg 3y agoI don't think it is some big "Washington and the buddies" conspiracy theory, but something much simpler. Fearmongering and doomer attitudes drive clicks for news publishers. Clicks drive money. Money drives their growth and influence. Which, in turn, drives more clicks. And guess who is thrashing around in their desperate attempts to stop bleeding influence and money in the internet age? Traditional news media. Not that difficult to see some clear examples of that either, like the recent bills in some countries trying to extort FB and Google to pay money for every news article shared on their platforms (for google it was in the form of the preview snippets, for fb it was in the form of users sharing links iirc).
- pphysch 3y agoThere is a component of click-baiting, but there are also clear mechanisms by which Washington promotes these misleading narratives.
- hackinthebochs 3y agoPutin's disinformation tactics are well known and documented. There is certainly a question of how much of a causal factor they are as opposed to the pre-existing fissures in society. But it's not reasonable to act like this is all a false narrative manufactured by whomever.
- pphysch 3y agoThis just isn't true. There is a well known and documented narrative that Trump is a Russian asset and Putin is puppeteering US politics and so on and so forth, but it doesn't match the evidence when you actually dig into it and abandon preconceived conclusions. Russia doesn't have anything remotely like the global propaganda apparatus based in Washington. They do a lot of propaganda, sure, but they are small fries in comparison. They are investing in changing that, however.
- hackinthebochs 3y agoPutin's disinformation tactics in the west go far beyond anything specifically related to Trump. Putin's facebook ad buy and relationship to Cambridge Analytica is well known. So is Putin's playbook for fomenting unrest in Eastern Europe. It's some serious myopia to think Putin's relevance is entirely related to Trump.
- pphysch 3y agoPlease show me an example of an ad that Putin used on Facebook (or anywhere).
- hackinthebochs 3y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/facebook-russian-political-ads.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/facebook-russi...
- pphysch 3y ago
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago> fomenting unrest in the west through various means utilizing the internet Various actors in the west have been manipulating narratives for decades. There are literally companies that provide astroturfing services to fossil fuel intetests and others. But suddently people discover Russia is getting in on the action too, now its cause for panic?
- hackinthebochs 3y ago>But suddently people discover Russia is getting in on the action too, now its cause for panic? Yes, an adversary working against American and democratic interests is a cause for concern over and above the typical American and western profit-seekers.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoLet me rephrase: we created the system where anyone and their dog can subvert the democratic process. Oil companies are doing it. Hackers are doing it. Random bloke down the pub and his dog too. And someone had an expectation that adversaries will not take advantage of it?
- last_responder 3y agoI suppose you think the invasion of Ukraine is either fake or justified as well.
- filoleg 3y agoNot the person you are replying to, but you are making an absolutely bad faith assumption here. Is it that impossible for you to imagine that someone could be extremely apalled by the invasion of Ukraine and be fully in support of their side (i.e., being fully opposed to the Russian side), while at the same time standing for the principles of open internet and not believing in wholesale disconnecting entire countries? Because that's my personal stance. I am fully on the side of Ukraine here, with no "ifs" or "buts", and I simultaneously don't believe in blackholing tens of millions of people like that being a good idea.
- neodymiumphish 3y agoIf a country is unwilling to make any effort to stop this criminal activity, why should individuals and organizations block them. They serve no benefit to the organizations exposing themselves.
- neodymiumphish 3y agoPutting my other comment another way: If MEGA is used repeatedly and almost exclusively by threat actors as an exfiltration point, and is unwilling to address legitimate concerns about their use across the web, why shouldn't every who isn't interested in using MEGA just block any connections to or from the service?
- pelorat 3y agoWhy not? I netblock everything from .ru and .cn from my own servers. It's the way to go.
- panki27 3y agoAnd what benefit do you gain from that? Still enough proxies and other ways around.
- consumer451 3y agoI did that as well. One benefit I got was learning that GeForce Now will store your PII on CCP controlled servers at nvidia.cn by default. This happened from the USA. I have never been able to come up with a non-conspiratorial reason as to why this choice was made. I was able to get around this is by changing the login POST to use nvidia.com and everything worked just fine, and the ping to .com was obviously faster. It is lightyears beyond dumb that this is even legal in the USA. Would love to be talked down from this with a rational explanation. NOTE: This happened in 2021
- rm_-rf_slash 3y agoHow did you catch the traffic? Wireshark?
- consumer451 3y agoNo, I geoblocked .ru and .cn in pfSense and a week later tried to register with GeForce Now. When it failed I opened devtools and saw the .cn attempt.
- panki27 3y agoIt doesn't matter under which TLD a domain is registered, the IP address it refers to can still be located anywhere in the world.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's the wrong question. The right question is what did he lose because of that. And the answer is likely 'nothing'. So it's a free gain with zero downside, makes good sense to me.