Its always DNS first and everyone says "lol, just change your DNS" and then they start doing real blocks. Optus in Australia did an IP level block of 4chan recently.
I would be surprised if Optus actually managed to do SNI filtering for the entire country without screwing it up.
Edit: Huh, seems like they do have a dedicated IP. At least both Robtex and Securitytrails report them as the only tenant on their IP. But you can /etc/hosts 4chan.org to a different Cloudflare IP, and CF will still SNI-route it to the real site. That would defeat any IP address-based block.
I have also written how the site can try to bypass the blocking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19552689
My VPN was blocked recently and I had to go to my network provider with my ID to prove my age(?!) so I could access my VPN again. I was not impressed.
Which fits fantastically in the discussion over at the San Diego Streetlight surveillance and the "Software engineers social responsibility"[1] vs. the fact that it will get worse if you make it mainstream.
Interesting times.
It's difficult not to be on a major ISP when the minor ISPs can't contest on speed and value for money.
Now I'm on ~64mbit VDSL with no blocking at all on Zen. We pull 500G+ a month through it. Costs £37.49 a month.
They just rolled out 300mbit fibre as well so that's going in next month.
Speed isn't everything for me. I can QoS those problems away pretty well.
Try doing that today with 5 people all trying to watch Netflix. That wasn't a thing back in 2002.
In 2002, I had 1mbit.
Apart from their mobile offering - plenty of bad things to say about that!
They fix stuff quickly too, I'd recommend em.
Of course if they block the whole VPN list you can just rent a tiny instance in a cloud somewhere, though that seems like enough work to bother most non techies.
In Germany she is heavily mocked for not understanding the Internet. Of course, it's the bright populace of high class forums such as Facebook and r/de who know better than the Physicist Chancellor of a G7 nation...
In reality, she meant it is legal Neuland. That authorities and courts had little established ways of enforcing laws online, that even heavily illegal acts were difficult to process and prosecute.
Now we are getting there. The law catches up with the Internet. If we want a free Sci-Hub and free content sharing, then it's the law that we have to adapt. Because governments already adapt their procedures - the online Wild West is over.
Kind of feels like "civilization" creeping into the Old West.
I for one have no faith in educating the government as long as companies with multi-million-dollar lobbying budgets are free to sway politicians to legislate in their favor. Happy to be convinced otherwise, though.
the only long term solution is to change the laws, not to work around them, but we don't have the economic power to balance the lobbies anymore.
What if you use your phone line to organize a crime? Is that a problem? Should we add word recognition to phone line to make sure this doesn't happen? Should we limit it to a series of specific words?
This would break phone usage.
The same apply to internet, except that it can do even more. The only ways to make sure theses criminal activities doesn't happen would be to limit how it can be used which break everything.
Somewhere out there someone read this and thought "wow that's a great idea"
Thanks to the lack of user accounts needed to use the site, pretty much everyone checks their social filter at the door, and it's earned some unfavorable comparisons. Given its reputation I'm not surprised to hear it's the subject of censorship.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/15/australian-med...
Outreach from social workers and societal safety net is the best way to prevent radicalization. I see legalization of drugs as an example.
If I was to commit some atrocities tomorrow and write a pamphlet outlining my motive and calling for others to do the same thing while adding a note saying "look, they'll try to censor this!" will you, out of principle, argue that my manifesto shouldn't be censured because that's what I would've wanted? If so, why?
In my opinion his main objective was to get attention and put his nauseous ideology in the spotlight. I don't know if banning it is the right solution but frankly I won't waste my time playing devil's advocate for a mass murderer.
"First they came for the terrorists and I did nothing because I wasn't a terrorist... And nothing of value was lost".
Hopefully society will not do that.
The content might be repulsive but we are better off knowing how they think than allowing only them to know the contents.
Crazy manifestos are probably just like weapons in this regard, ordinary people won't care to get one if they are illegal, bad guys will.
As a kid I got a good explanation of how badly certain ideologies failed even if they looked reasonable.
I also got an intro to safe handling of guns, especially the part about never ever pointing a gun at anyone, loaded or not, except in wartime. I was quite young then but it sticks, like a whole lot of other stuff from my childhood.
I'll try to give that to the next generation together, together with an explanation of how insanely stupid such manifestos are - and a crash course in unarmed fighting (disable or confuse opponent, get away).
Young people should know what exists or it will take them by surprise.
> "First they came for the terrorists and I did nothing because I wasn't a terrorist... And nothing of value was lost".
Definitions of "terrorist" differs and while I and you can agree on this and many others I really really don't want to have more power than necessary in the hands of any government.
Read history and you'll see that most cruelties in the last few hundred years were commited by states against their own citizens, not by random blokes with weapons.
Speaking as a us citizen, that is crazy talk. Why should the government be let to decide what is "too dangerous" for me to read? It seems incredible that first world democracies still engage in that kind of censorship.
Another instance, I think fox and Breitbart are scourges for their disinformation campaign (not that they're "conservative" or have an "agenda", the wsj is also conservative and has an agenda), but making them illegal is a line too far. It provides too much power to a government who already has too much.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/08/14/charl...
Obviously the risk is not that reasonably educated HN readers could stumble upon this manifesto and start a massacre, the risk is that the material could be used as propaganda to brainwash more easily-influenced people. People become radicalized on the web, actually the shooter himself kept spouting "memes" straight from /pol/ and other alt-right websites. Similarly many Islamist terrorists who carried attacks in recent years also radicalized online, feeding on propaganda websites and fake news.
Does banning 4chan or the manifesto achieve anything? I'm not sure. But dismissing any attempt to curb this very real problem as "crazy talk" is not really constructive criticism.
You can literally make the same argument against fox or Breitbart. Or cnn, nyt, wapo as the president continuously tries to. He should remind you why the government should have limited powers.
And yes, the general fear of sex and sexual is maddening and counter productive.
I guess it makes sense if you're a libertarian/anarchist or something in this vicinity but if that's the case this discussion has been rehashed millions of times before and I don't think we'll find a common ground here.
But this seems to clearly intensify. We now have laws passed "to regulate things against Fake News during election period"[1], in a climate of already large distrust of population against politics.
It's really unclear how this plain censorship is not replaced with a mandatory warning, which would give the opportunity to let people judge by themselves (or at least decide to trust the authority that the material doesn't worth their attention).
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikim%C3%A9dia_France/Fausse...