Author Topic: Hall of Shame

Hall of Shame
« on: September 02, 2022 »


A point could be made about *good quality*



masks, i.e. respirators (it surprised me to learn that the better ones are called that), but any chance of that has been lost. Here's another suitable inductee, from earlier this year:



I'm actually pleased that my first exhibit was from someone who impressed me in the past for having the sense to agree with me. Nice to have a bit of variety - keeps you from taking any one person too seriously.



PS. I take the lab leak theory seriously. Possibly with a little help from their friends.

Hall of Shame
« Reply #1 on: September 04, 2022 »
Mainstream reporting on Russia and Ukraine.



Mainstream reporting on so many things...

Hall of shame
« Reply #2 on: September 16, 2022 »

https://twitter.com/liamlavelle9/status/1571582475578773504

The queen's viking funeral was totally appropriate. Making sure we pay appropriate respect to the life of a woman of almost unimaginable wealth and privilege requires that many of us get burnt.

Infowars
« Reply #3 on: September 22, 2022 »
PayPal’s censorship marks a vicious new phase in the war on free speech - Fraser Nelson
Until now, financial services have rarely policed the political opinions of their clients: such behaviour was thought to have been left behind after the collapse of communism. But to an extent that politicians have not properly realised, British traditions of free speech are being steadily replaced by de facto Silicon Valley censorship.

PayPal vs Toby Young isn’t about free speech – it’s about the free market - Chris Stokel-Walker
But scratch beneath the surface of Young’s claims and you begin to realise that the ban may be more justified than people think. This isn’t just a rabble-rouser trying to keep the home fires burning in a fictitious, bubbly culture war. The Times reported that PayPal closed it down for spreading Covid disinformation – a real harm that puts lives at risk. The R value of disinformation discouraging people from taking up the offer of perfectly safe vaccines outstrips that of the virus that has killed, to date, 6.5 million people.

Quote from: Bob Dylan
There's a battle [online] and it is ragin'

Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet - Joshua Moon
I've moved the Kiwi Farms domain to Cloudflare's domain registrar. This is a very risky decision, because in the past the mob would direct its noise at both Dreamhost and Cloudflare. Now, there's a more centralized point of failure. I am ordinarily afraid to even say the name Cloudflare, as if speaking it aloud could remind them I exist and compel them to step on me.

The world should not need Kiwi Farms - Corinna Cohn
On September 3rd, the security company Cloudflare dropped the website Kiwi Farms as a customer...

Kiwi Farms is one of the websites right-thinking journalists warn you to avoid visiting. Its users include journalists, lawyers, and academics arguing cheek-to-jowl with white supremacists, fascists, and every other type of rat-eating troglodyte with access to a keyboard. Unlike the highly-regulated social media platforms to which we’ve become accustomed, Kiwi Farms allows discussion of nearly any topic, but typically users flock to forums to document, discuss, and yes, sometimes harass outlandish public figures...

Journalists are swapping out their duties from reporting news to defining what is information and what is “disinformation.” The media companies, competing for attention first and dollars second, are providing their full backing. The world should not need a website like Kiwi Farms. Instead Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Wordpress, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and the myriad other publishing platforms should already be open forums supporting free expression and committed to viewpoint neutrality. But this is not the reality. Kiwi Farms, though it may be a hive of scum and villainy, may also be one of the last places where free expression lives online. The only way to solve a problem like Kiwi Farms is to restore the norm of free expression everywhere else.





(Oops, got myself in that screenshot)

In the spirit of the post, I'll give a Kossack the last word.

Whoever will stand up for the bigoted hatemongers behind KiwiFarms? Glenn Greenwald, of course - Darrell Lucus
KiwiFarms, the now-defunct website that made it its business to dox, swat, and harass innocent people—especially trans people—got a long-overdue dose of karma last weekend. Security firm Cloudflare stopped providing KiwiFarms with protection from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks late Saturday night. after initially resisting calls from one of its latest victims, trans activist and streamer Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti, to cut ties. Cloudflare’s claims that cutting the cord with KiwiFarms would do more harm than good came undone in the wake of increasingly violent posts from KiwiFarms users...

Now, who would have a problem with this deserved downfall? Glenn Greenwald, of course. He seems to think taking down one of the most noxious websites ever created is a sign of authoritarianism run amok.

No, let's let Ira Glasser have the last word instead:
Quote
when I came to the ACLU, my major passion was social justice, particularly racial justice. But my experience was that free speech wasn't an antagonist. It was an ally. It was a critical ally. I said this to the audience, and I was astonished to learn that most of them were astonished to hear it—I mean, these were very educated, bright young people, and they didn't seem to know this history—I told them that there is no social justice movement in America that has ever not needed the First Amendment to initiate its movement for justice, to sustain its movement for justice, to help its movement survive.

Martin Luther King Jr. knew it. Margaret Sanger knew it. [The labor leader] Joe Hill knew it. I can think of no better explication of it than the late, sainted John Lewis, who said that without free speech and the right to dissent, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings. And that's historically and politically true without exception. For people who today claim to be passionate about social justice to establish free speech as an enemy is suicidal.

Ira and this guy:


Hall of shame
« Reply #4 on: September 24, 2022 »



& will be even more so with the latest cuts back home...


clicky

lectoris attentio fere certe erratica est
« Reply #5 on: October 04, 2022 »
Quote from: sources
In 2016, Anthony Novak created a parody Facebook page of the Parma, Ohio police deptartment which was live for all of 12 hours. It copied the police department's name and profile picture. But the account was listed under "community" pages rather than the designation for government agencies. For readers who might have overlooked that distinction, there were plenty of other clues that the page was an elaborate joke. Novak changed the department's motto from "We know crime" to "We no crime," for example, and his six posts were flagrantly farcical.

Police later arrested him, and a Cuyahoga County grand jury charged him with disrupting public service, a fourth-degree felony. A jury acquitted Novak at trial.

The Onion to the rescue:
Quote from: friend-of-the-court
The Onion laid out why it believes the authorities in Ohio had acted unconstitutionally, sprinkling in sincere arguments in defense of parody while riddling the rest of the text with moments of jest and hubris — claiming, for example, a readership of 4.3 trillion, and also boasting that it “owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes.”

Chapter headings included: “Parody Functions By Tricking People Into Thinking That It Is Real” and “It Should Be Obvious That Parodists Cannot Be Prosecuted For Telling A Joke With A Straight Face.”

In page 15 of its 18-page filing, the brief accepted that “the reader’s attention is almost certainly wandering.”

“So here is a paragraph of gripping legal analysis to ensure that every jurist who reads this brief is appropriately impressed by the logic of its argument and the lucidity of its prose,” it says, before dishing out a series of phrases it said was for the “Latin dorks” in the federal judiciary: “Bona vacantia. De bonis asportatis. Writ of certiorari.”

Hall of shame
« Reply #6 on: November 05, 2022 »
Canary in the internet coal mine?
Quote from: NecessaryScene
I think I need to fill in the technical details of the latest Internet horror.

One of the key backbone providers has decided to start throwing away traffic headed to Josh's network. This fundamentally breaks every design principle of the Internet.

They're basically advertising that they can carry traffic anywhere, and listing out what routes they have available, so that all the intermediate hops can choose a route.

So they're saying something like "sure, I can deliver stuff to Josh, in 5 hops" (alongside the info for squillions of other networks). And all the other systems around them who decide that's the best route, then send their traffic to them.

They then throw it away. They're not refusing traffic, they're accepting it and dropping it.

At this point, this generates a technical fault, and ISPs all over the world are being contacted by customers to complain that their routes aren't working ("my packets are getting 7 hops, but then vanish", as determined by a "traceroute" tool). So they're going to figure out where in the chain it's happening, and if this network won't fix it, they are going to have to route around the damage - this backbone provider is malfunctioning, so neighbours are going have to route around it with a rule "don't send packets to X to that network, even if they say they can handle it". Or maybe just "don't send packets to that network at all".

In the short term, this can be patched around, and if it happens rarely, network managers can deal with it. But if they keep doing it, and the practice spreads, the whole network management falls to pieces.

The Internet can't work smoothly when administrators let their machines lie about where they can route traffic to, and everyone else has to have a huge perpetual continually-updated manual list of "where to not send data" that overrides the automatic "where to send data" protocols that computers auto-negotiate.

So, anyway, what has Josh done now? I'm not sure. If I had to guess, something fundamental to send route advertisements that rewrite the Internet backbone's routing tables to basically set a load of his distributed data centres around the world to be the optimum route to his network. Automatically overriding any automated choice to go through the bad "black hole" people, by winning on "cost". If he's saying he's got the best direct route to his network from each data centre, all the automated machines will believe him. It automates the route-around.

Arguably he may be falsely advertising too low a cost, so the data takes a longer route than it should, but it's a much less bad lie than their lie. It's a clear workaround, and he wouldn't have to do it if they weren't lying.

They of course could start lying more to try to override his routes.

This could rapidly get out of hand - how far are they prepared to break the entire Internet?

The whole thing works on the assumption of good faith and co-operation, and people not sending false advertisements. If tolerated, it's hard to see how the Internet survives.

Quote from: ApocalipstickNow
I didn’t understand any of that, I’m just picturing very determined bunnies hopping on journeys with boxes of newspaper cuttings about people doing stupid things.