4chan, 8chan blocked by Australian and NZ ISPs for hosting shooting video
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
When they block Facebook for streaming it live, then I'll be impressed.
A decent method of side-stepping ISP DNS is to run Unbound DNS on your home router or a server in your home, if you can.
An example snippet from the configuration in Unbound DNS would look like this:
forward-zone:
name: "."
forward-addr: 1.1.1.1 # CloudFlare
forward-addr: 1.0.0.1 # CloudFlare
forward-addr: 8.8.8.8 # Google
forward-addr: 8.8.4.4 # Google
forward-addr: 208.67.222.222 # OpenDNS
forward-first: no
unbound-control dump_infra | grep 1\.1\.1
1.1.1.1 . ttl 1745 ping 0 var 71 rtt 284 rto 284 tA 0 tAAAA 0 tother 0 ednsknown 1 edns 0 delay 0 lame dnssec 0 rec 0 A 0 other 0
You can also enable TCP and TLS for recursive servers that support DoT (DNS over TLS). I prefer this over DoH, as everything in your home can benefit from it, not just your browser. Some of the servers mentioned above listen on TCP 853 for TLS. Just google "Unbound DNS TLS" There are some examples on Calomel as well. [1]
Here is an example snippet using TLS: (not the full config)
server:
delay-close: 200
do-tcp: yes
tcp-upstream: yes
cache-min-ttl: 300
forward-zone:
name: "."
forward-ssl-upstream: yes
forward-addr: 208.67.222.222@853
forward-addr: 1.1.1.1@853
forward-addr: 8.8.4.4@853
forward-addr: 9.9.9.9@853
forward-first: no
unbound-control dump_infra | cut -c 1-60 | column -t
9.9.9.9@853 . ttl 851 ping 6 var 84 rtt 342 rto 342 tA 0 tAA
8.8.4.4@853 . ttl 851 ping 13 var 79 rtt 329 rto 329 tA 0 tA
208.67.222.222@853 . ttl 844 ping 876 var 1823 rtt 8168 rto
[1] - https://calomel.org/unbound_dns.html
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_recursive_name_server
Should Aus block sms, WhatsApp, and iMessage because the content gets re-shared there too? Should they block Google because you can find links to the content there?
I saw this video, I made myself watch it. (judge me)
Then I went back to my tv show. There were scenes of soldiers attacking the "heroes" in a bowling alley, and it made me horrified and sick. And I realized Hollywood is glorifying this shit. Hollywood is promoting shootings like this.
An hour before, and this tv show was entertainment to me. Now I feel like a twisted sicko for enjoying violent entertainment just like what is in the New Zealand video.
This video changed me, it made me see violence in a new light. It's sick to be entertained by re-enactments of this in the same way as the original.
A better comparison would be videos produced by terrorist organizations which use 9/11 footage to promote their own views: that would be something I could see being argued for a ban.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong to ban host sites under certain conditions - I just think the analogy is just way too disparate to be viable.
Now imagine that the same unfounded rumors start and sites are barred from displaying the videos so people can "make up their own mind".
There will always be conspiracy theories but hiding the footage, IMHO, will increase it dramatically.
To be clear, it's terrible footage and I think it's good FB, Youtube, and other private sites are choosing to bar it from their platforms.
But I worry that in the long run, if you start doing things like banning any domain that hosts it, you'll feed into some of the worst elements of the internet.
No need for that, 4chan is a free for all. It's where I saw most ISIS execution videos.
There are specialized uses, but for most of us, I'm skeptical that it's important to have video of news events as they happen. If nobody caught 9/11 on video, what would be different?
For many years, no cameras were allowed in courtrooms or in Congress. It seems like that was fine?
I guess it's the norm in Australia and New Zealand now as well. And let's not forget that Sci-Hub has been blocked in a bunch of countries (including the US) and their domains have been taken away [1].
It looks to me that Australia, in particular, is the testing ground for FIVE EYES censorship efforts. Australia recently passed a draconian anti-encryption law [2] which will impact a number of multi-national companies. Other members of FIVE EYES are gauging the fallout from this and are probably waiting for some tragedy to strike before they can enact similar laws.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#Legal_situation
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/7/18130391/encryption-law-a...
Australia doesn't have free speech in so far as the US does with the first amendment. Australia doesn't have a citizen Bill of Rights either. This combined with Australian's penchant for not taking risks does bode well for using it as a Five Eyes testing ground to remove what some would consider basic rights.
This is not a a daily instance of "he says", "she says" offensiveness. This is an act of terror, and these platform served as a propaganda media which ought to stopped.
Should we ban security companies from using the video for training purposes or to design better security or anti-terror measures?
Should we ban people from sharing the attacker's name?
Should we ban news agencies from even reporting on attacks like this? Keep in mind that news-coverage especially has been shown to incite copy-cat attacks.
Edit: Also, facebook pro-actively took down the video as soon as they became aware.
Is it really, though, or do people just like the slippery slope fallacy a bit too much?
Does everyone really think that if a government bans 4chan, no one and nothing is going to stop them from banning everything else because there's precedent now and nothing can be done? That's not how societies or governments tend to work.
Russian here. It's exactly how ours works.
"Oh - don't worry, this time in human history it won't be a slippery slope!" is not a very compelling argument when we have historical precedent of the opposite being true time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again.
Do we? Because we appear to be in one of several threads about how the ease with which certain content spreads around the internet makes attempts at censorship futile, and I can legally buy a copy of Mein Kampf and the Turner Diaries and read the Unabomber's manifesto and all kinds of stuff generally agreed upon to be "bad things," and I don't see the vast amount of "good things" being censored everywhere as a result of the slippery slope of censorship.
Censorship is applied in different degrees in different places, yes, China is not the US is not Europe, but that doesn't signal the universal certainty that "time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again" seems to imply.
Maybe the slippery slope is just, like, a tiny slope? Maybe it's a slope but it's not as slippery as you think? Maybe there's more than one slope?
Or is it just a matter of time until the boot crushes all of our heads, or something?
I would like to ask that you take a moment to reflect on this statement ... ... ... Okay now moving on.
Who's to say they need to censor "good things"? They only need to censor things that you don't agree with censoring. I won't pretend to know your political standings but I can guarantee you that your opinion and the governments opinion on what should be censored will eventually reach a disagreement.
People tend to give governments powers during a time of need or when they are frightened often in exchange for "increased safety". A perceived increase of safety that may - or may not - result in more safety but with 100% certainty results in giving up certain rights or freedoms.
For the easiest example of exchanging things for a perceived increase in safety. What do you think of the TSA? Is the intrusiveness and racism in the 'random selections' actually resulting in increased safety and security? Or is it mostly security theater? It tramples over peoples' privacy and sometimes violates their rights for a perceived increase of safety but the failure rate is so high that it is meaningless. The government isn't going to get rid of that power (the TSA) so easily. After all, we gave it to them and they'll gladly keep up the security theater in exchange.
The U.S signed away large portions of our privacy and removed many checks & balances placed on the government after the 9/11 attacks. The USA-PATRIOT Act was forced through in a time of need where people were frightened in exchange for safety and security.
By the time you realize you've given the government too much power it's far too late to take any of it back. History is full of examples and history may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
Is it really, though, or do people just like the strawman fallacy a bit too much?
Well, strawmen are often involved in the invocation of slippery slope arguments, so yes, probably.
I didn't invoke any strawman. A slippery slope argument is, by definition, precisely as I described - that a particular degenerative state (be it social, or political) will inevitably be reached starting from some innocent and minor consequence, and that this trend cannot be reversed or corrected for.
You know, like falling down a slope that's slippery.
Except in the degenerative state that you talked about. No reasonable person has said that the censoring of this one case would lead to censorship of everything, but that's exactly what you decided on for the degenerative state.
> no one and nothing is going to stop them from banning everything else
Try to backpedal harder.
We should be glad he has no such power.
The government cannot direct the rating and censoring of material in NZ. It’s an independent commission operating under the strict legislation that establishes it and checked by the judicial system. If NZ had a Trump he could not order anything to be censored. That’s not how it works.
Like a lot of parliamentary systems, NZ agencies and commissions operate independently under the laws that establish them. In the US it’s very different, each new President comes in an appoints a huge number of positions that direct these agencies and those positions have tremendous political influence of them. Hence you can have a new EPA director appointed by someone like Trump who comes in expressly to cut down the EPA and who answers to Trump for his marching orders. This may be where some of this confusion comes from.
I mean, I think it's horrible, but I can envision lots of functional and useful societies that are horrible based on my principles (how would you like to to be part of a hize mind?), but that doesn't make them bad in an absolute sense.
Scaled down, freedom of speech is to protect us from changing cultural and mob rule running roughshod over what we consider good and bad to the detriment of all. The law would basically just lag internet outrage by a few months or years.
Edit: This is meant to be interpreted in context, where a platform has taken a stance that it doesn't censor, and a government blocking that platform. I'm also not making a stance that anything goes, as speech inciting direct action against the law (or meant to cause a situation which is immediately and obviously unsafe) is problematic, and under what I take free speech to embody, which is freedom of thought and to express those thoughts. As absolutist as the first words sound, it's not really meant to be interpreted that way, but more as a call to acknowledge that good and bad are relative to the farthest degree, which is about as far from absolutist as you can get.
Edit 2: From closer reading, it wasn't actually a government request. The article notes that the government often issues these through the courts, but the ISPs acted on their own in this case.
Absolutism is poison.
In that case, you're for free speech in principle, but not in practice.
Which is fair, given that free speech in practice means being willing to commit felonies.
I'm not sure I follow. What "free speech" do you think is currently a felony in the US?
I think 4chan has gone too far on this one. They should ban neonazi propaganda. -- the grandparent
and
> it's all culturally defined.
contradict each other completely, right?
Everyone is for free speech, it just everyone has a different idea of what that means (as you say)
If you're "for free speech as long as it's accepted within my culture" then you're not for free speech. I did clarify a bit in my original comment what I was going for though.
It's the "hate speech" label that gets complicated based on who defines it. Many who claim things are hate speech today also use hate speech themselves (following your definition of suppression based on race) to shout down and ban others.
It shows just how complex this situation is and why "hate speech" is precisely the type of speech that needs defense in the first place because it's mostly rooted in defiance and disagreement, not outright hate.
No. The 1st amendment of the US constitution is about government interference - the idea of free speech is broader than that.
Yes, it does. It has to, otherwise free speech is defined as any arbitrary level of censorship a government allows, and one could say North Korea has just as much "free speech" as the US.
Now, I'm not making an argument that free speech as such is preferable or even feasible in a civil society, or that censorship per se is wrong, and I'm definitely not making the typical slippery slope argument that any form of censorship will inevitably lead to tyranny.
However, free speech has to be defined as a constant to mean anything objective.
- Define innocent
- Define political
- Define evil
In way that is independent of the culture in which it takes place. It might even be possible to do so, or come close, when limited to current cultures and Humans. That's a far cry from proved as universal though. It's been quite a while since I read it, but I believe this short story[1] covers some of the ground I'm trying to express. Note: If you key off humans/aliens, I think you're missing the point.
1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-e...
I think the opposite is true. It is gratifying to the logical mind to process this event through the lens of pedantic philosophical analysis, but in real life most things aren't so ambiguous and they definitely aren't ambiguous in this case.
> Define innocent
In this context I define innocent as "undeserving of abrupt and violent execution".
> Define political
In this context I define political as "of or with regard to government or government policy".
> Define evil
In this context I define evil as "a profoundly immoral act".
Seems pretty straightforward.
Unfortunately, I don't have time to read the story you linked (though it does seem interesting even though I am generally not a fan of yudkowsky's writings), but if you want to summarize it I don't mind addressing that summary.
Okay, you've traded innocent for undeserving. That doesn't feel any more definitive to me. Who's undeserving?
> In this context I define political as "of or with regard to government or government policy".
Governments are made up of the people. If they aren't enslaved, then they have some responsibility for the action of said government. It's one group of people doing something to another group. Whether it's from some government or not is irrelevant. For example, is not a non-government group advocating for the eradication of a subgroup of people evil in your reasoning? That's not political in any way.
> In this context I define evil as "a profoundly immoral act".
You've already stated morality is relative in your first comment. You're relying on a relative assessment to claim something as universal.
> Seems pretty straightforward.
It seems fairly shaky to me.
More people died in 9/11, but those videos are all over the place, even on youtube. Those planes hitting those specific builder _were_ the message of the terrorists.
I think they'd be happier with the policy of, "if you don't like it, leave" than trying to appease others.
Also people need to realize chan culture. Each board may as well be its own website. 4chan hosts /pol/, it also hosts /lgbt/. 4chan's moderation (rather, lack of) is being seen as an issue because of how heavily moderated the internet has become in the past 20 years.
Reddit, the "bastion of free speech", bans every subreddit that gets in the way of advertisement money, giving Voat more popularity. 4chan, "a bastion of free speech", banned #Gamergate discussion which gave 8chan its rise to popularity.
I'd rather have extremists on Reddit and 4chan where they can be debated and talked down to by moderates than on Voat and 8chan where they can form echo chambers. Echo chambers are a lot better at recruitment. Pushing "bad people" away where they are out of sight and out of mind hasn't been solving the problem, it has only been making it worse year over year.
if you are old enough to remember /b/ raiding Hal Turner, i'm pretty sure that same thing would have happened to Alex Jones had raiding not been banned.
I don't believe 4chan will ever share this sentiment with you.
That former group has disappeared, and 4chan has become the biggest echo chamber on the Internet. There are stretches of hours and thousands of posts where there isn't a single dissenting political opinion.
The irreverence of 4chan was always the appeal. It has morphed into a lockstep belief system in a hero figure. What's the point of a website with anonymous posts and no rules if everyone is carefully agreeing with each other?
Basically, the idea of being racist is so absurd, that by being ironically racist I'm poking fun at the racists, not the races.
It's not a completely ridiculous notion (though it's abused heavily); satire is a common tactic for comedy. Clearly people go too far, and I don't think it's a good excuse to say "it's just satire".
I'm not exactly sure where we draw the line socially. I don't really have a problem with something like The Colbert Report, but I also really hate the "shitlord" movement that seems to be happening.
Besides, I think there are legitimate uses of this footage. We live in a world where mass shootings are increasing. But there is no public awareness in countering these situations. I think at this point we should train students from a young age, and adults, on what to do if in an active shooter situation. The fact that this isn't done is incredibly scary to me. I personally saw the footage, so that I can potentially pick up things from it and potentially save my life if god forbid I end up in a situation like that.
I am so incredibly saddened and frustrated by the lack of training for these situations in our society. With a proper response I think so many lives could have been saved. In this instance, killer went into the mosque and all the people formed 2 giant clumps/clusters around the 2 door exists on either side of the central entrance the killer entered from. Killer just unloaded on the right hand side cluster, then left hand side cluster. He faced practically zero opposition. One brave man successfully tackled him to the ground but by that time it was already too late.
I understand that in a panic situation like that it's fight or flight and most people understandably lose their heads and try to flee, and it is very hard to coordinate a counter attack to something like this. But this is why I say we need to bring this type of training in schools and in our day to day lives. I know it's a morbid reality where such a thing is necessary but alas such is the reality right now. If everyone had rushed the killer instead of forming 2 giant convenient clusters for the killer to unload into, I think so many lives would have been saved.
What? How is this good, this is obviously extremely bad. Which you also state?
Package it with a safety curriculum, and people should watch it to know what to do. In particular: For the most part, those people in the video who ran, lived, those who tried to drop low, or froze up, died. (There were a couple of exceptions.)
Additionally, one guy tried to attack the shooter and was killed. But it was just one guy, everyone else was too scared. If instead they had all attacked, some would have died, but not as many.
(It sounds like I'm blaming them, I'm not.)
There are a lot of safety lessons in that video, and people should watch it.
If you normalize an attack like this to the point that you start training the general populace for its (statistically unlikely) occurrence, you have effectively made terrorism in this form that much more effective.
I think you overestimate how common this style of mass shooting are outside of war zones. Even in places where gun violence is high mass shootings are incredibly rare[2].
Between 1966 and 2012 there were 18 mass shootings in the country with the second most count[1].
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/in...
[2]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/theres-a-new-global-rank...
This guy maybe was trained... but who knows, 10 people fighting for their lives of their families and kids would be scary to face.
But those 5 people would have to take the increased risk of getting killed, which is difficult to convince than just run. Also the standard safety norms, says to do not indulge with the attacker.
Prior to this established hijacking procedure and expectation was cooperate, you’ll be flowen to some foreign country. There’ll be a demand for such and such prisoners to be released. A negotiation. Eventually the passengers will be released. As soon as people knew the planes were being used as weapons and this wasn’t the hijackings of past the fought back.
It didn’t require video.
I tried to watch it. I had to stop the video as he entered the mosque before he fired a shot.
My heart started racing and i felt sick. it was such a pedestrian build up.
This is fucked
Shouting "FIRE" in a crowded theatre has always been illegal.
Because it's illegal to have a copy or to publish it the ISPs are likely liable for having transient copies in their routers (these laws were written for film), the ISPs chose to do this initially purely as a public service but now I suspect that they are likely legally liable if they don't make a good faith effort to block these sites (remember ISPs can IP block and DNS block, they can't edit an SSL query on the fly, so everything at that IP will be blocked, if you're hosting your web site along with a snuff film archive I don't have a lot of sympathy for you).
A couple of people have already been in court for sharing it, one is an actual nazi, the other alt-right who may also be an accomplice.
Several people have also lost their jobs for sharing it at work or just plain accessing it at work (this is an action by the companies, not the govt).
There's no real reason why anyone needs to watch this snuff video, except maybe the police themselves as evidence.
You are using the same manipulative cherry-picked argument to justify censorship. Censorship is a weapon used by dictators, not free leaders.
And they will choose anything and everything that threatens their power. The actual contents don't matter.
Censorship is part of our law, it's right and proper for the NZ censor to declare the snuff video as obscene, that's his job according to law. We're a democracy, if we decide we don't need a censor we'll legislate him away.
In the meantime I'm curious why you are so in favour of this video, are you a supporter of the terrorist and his goals?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/03/new-zealand-men-...
I absolutely loath the video, it's revolting. But as I mentioned ealier, worse stuff has been online and still is.
I think the problem is that many people don't want to really know what was on the video and be appalled by it without truly knowing.
Do you know what was on it? It was sick and terrible. But, since I have seen the whole thing (I made myself) I can compare it with other videos.
The last few years of ISIS videos of drownings, murders, pushing people off of roofs, mass shootings, etc... (only part of a few I saw, and what I saw was so terrible I turned it off)
A _slew_ of videos that are 10 times more graphic, sick and violent have been shown on CNN, Fox News and elsewhere.
So, if you believe this one video is worse than others, I would like to know which part is more horrific than people being burned alive in a cage? Yet, I didn't hear one single peep about censoring those videos, or anyone being arrested or jailed for sharing ISIS terrorist propaganda.
I'm sorry for you that you watched it all the way through, that sounds like a sick compulsion, please get help
The ISIS videos of people being executed were magnitudes more gruesome than this, and they were on CNN/FOX news.
Do you think everyone who watches the evening news has a sick compulsion as well?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs#Efficacy_of_the_U...
------------------
I think the grandparent was referencing this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
The fact that it becomes harder to get isn't going to make Joe-Everyman curious about what the big deal is. He gets that the big deal is that it's a video of actual humans being actually murdered, and he probably has feelings about that.
This is a great tool for stifling opposing politics of _any_ kind. And seems like the easiest way to start an oppressive tyranny than a method of stopping terrorist propaganda.
Psychos don't need videos like this. Just watch movies, there are many that are far worse than the New Zealand shooting videos... (and plenty have propaganda in them as well)
Your argument requires beforehand authoritarian capture of all branches of the NZ government to make sense. At which point the whole suggestion is moot.
The actual "really bad" results of this is years away still. But this is how freedom of speech is stripped away. Under the guise of safety, one tiny piece at a time.
Would George Washington have fought the British if the British had succeeded is censoring every pamphlet? Would India have succeeded in escaping the power of Britain if Ghandi couldn't speak openly?
If the cost of censorship is tyranny world wide, it's not worth it.
We _need_ freedom of speech, even if it allows kooks the same platform, that is cost we should be willing to pay.
Viewing this as a NZ only issue is thinking small. There's discussions about free speech in the US and all over the world about this issue.
> This is a great tool for stifling opposing politics of _any_ kind. And seems like the easiest way to start an oppressive tyranny than a method of stopping terrorist propaganda.
You’re talking about a tool in New Zealand you clearly knew nothing about but presumed was some kind of censorship you’d find in a dictatorship. You’ve been corrected on that. Then your concern was far away authoritarian regimes. Now your concern is the US and yet you bring up nothing related to how New Zealand’s Office of Film and Literature’s classification applies to potential US pathways into tyranny.
Both NZ and the US and all other countries are becoming more oppressive every year. Censorship (the tool of tyranny and dictators) is constantly be pushed to "protect" someone.
If you think NZ won't change because of these events you are deceiving yourself.
(from a USian perspective) Instead, we let the media setup a vibrant tradeoff of emotional tourism versus steering away from direct confrontation. Just enough so that indulging can be written off as mourning rather than the goreporn it is.
I agree with people's zeal w.r.t public executions, but isn't a key ingredient of the social validation is that it is a "justified" killing?
Is his narrative actually compelling though? Or does it just come off as misguided/pathetic/wrong/etc? By without commentary, I really mean unmediated by talking heads transmuting it into something to drive their own popularity.
I haven't read much about this actual event, because I think every visit given to news articles just contributes to their incentives of creating a spectacle. I'm not exactly looking to engage in emotional tourism right now, but perhaps I'll have to put my theory to the test on myself.
But, I didn't want to pose an allegation like that with so few facts.
Edit: I'm a so-called decentralization advocate and I'd add on to this to say that the big problem we have right now is that people don't think we need decentralization at all. Something like this might change some minds.
Sure, from a technical point of view. But governments and the general public won’t necessarily see a lack of control over the content as something good or even legal. I expect to see some clash and fight over those questions if a significant number of 4chan/8chan users start to migrate to decentralized platforms.
Disclaimer: Take the below images with a grain of salt, I wasn't able to verify how they were generated.
Internet Connectivity in 2003 vs 2010 via The Opte Project:
2003: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/110263#
2010: https://equipping4eministry.com/2015/03/05/a-visual-look-at-...
Unfortunately opte.org appears to be down at the moment (the irony) so I had to dig these ones up. To me, this is a visualization of what the current status quo is as far as those in power "addressing" the issue of content.
If you can get 99% of the people using the same websites that are compliant with what the governments think are okay, then the 1% doesn't matter too much. So we saw things quietly shifting toward this paradigm. The way I see it is that the <1% who know how to use the dark web are going to not matter to the governments too much, as long as that number of people stays low. Significant numbers of 4chan and 8chan users and others migrating might raise that number to a point where you'll start to see more proactive measures taken.
But actions like these taken by Australia and NZ (using iron instead of velvet) will only accelerate the number of people interested in alternatives, and would therefore undermine the status quo strategy I outlined above.
Anyway none of those are going to be as big an issue as when people start to share stuff on freenet, if only because when they are forced to put it there, there is no filter between them and untraceable child porn.
I don't remember what social platforms and governments did about those because I made it a point to avoid them so there was no chance of seeing the horror.
Honestly, who needs the shit popping back in their head during any random moment?
It seems that if the message is supported (attack a foreign country) the populace will put up with a lot. And it doesn't take anything (just words) to be censored if they disagree with you.
Overall, even web search engines and ISPs need to be vigilant during indexing/hosting of websites and come up with some method of periodic review of websites being visited/hosted and tag them as appropriate or non appropriate.
Somebody profiting from somebody's death or misery or injury is not cool and goes against the very grain of civility.