darkcalling [comrade/them,she/her]
DNS over HTTPS still has to go to a DNS server. If cloudflare, google, all the other big names plus ISP DNS servers all are forced to comply and not resolve or blackhole certain domains what are you going to do? Set your DNS to be in some third country with terrible response times and delayed page loads for all browsing as a result? Query the root DNS servers with your own home-rolled DNS (gee I wonder who controls them if they really went all out, hmm and they don’t support any kind of encryption anyways)? I guess you could but it’s a pain and most people won’t because of cost, skill, and/or experience degradation.
I guess you could use tor and certain other censorship resistant alternative networks but how many people are going to use those? Not that many. Makes it easier to zero in on and conduct targeted attacks, identification, de-anonymization, etc if you want to of those who remain.
Secondly, small ISPs do not transit anywhere meaningful for this ban. If tiktok is banned it’s not like your Podunk small town ISP is peering directly with them or for that matter communistforums dot org or chinadaily dot cn or russia today or whatever. They have to go through a tier 1 carrier. I don’t care if your small town ISP can’t afford such equipment because the big ones can. And they’re the ones who matter. They’re the ones who connect to off-shore routes and international landings and yes CDNs. They’re the ones all roads must go through. They, the big CDNs like Amazon, Cloudflare, Akamai. They’re the gatekeepers.
And anyways at this point you’re breaking the law. Technical evasion is almost a side discussion regarding the actual issue. If you’re any kind of person critical of empire they’re already zeroed in on you, they just have to catch you and believe me they know when you’re using these censorship resistant networks. They may not know what you’re doing with them but the second you slip a little you risk your ass being hauled into court. Maybe you’re willing to take that risk. Most people are not and that’s the goal. They don’t need to stop the 1 in one million die-hard communists from accessing foreign media, they just need to stop you from being able to link it to dem-socs to radicalize them or to debunk lies of the war-mongering bourgeois media and their narratives. So sure, you can be that weird person who knows the truth but can’t speak it without admitting to a crime and that’s the goal. And your technological solutions do not solve a legal and political problem. Because you and a hundred thousand other people in the country knowing about a falsity is useless if you can only repeat it back to other people already guilty of the same crime. They don’t care about converting existing communists or anti-imperialists. They won’t care about stopping you from reading this stuff. They just care about stopping us from spreading the message and the truth. That’s what this is, a delaying strategy to buy time as empire implodes.
“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” ~John Gilmore
Liberal pablum and idealist nonsense. Acting as if the internet is independent of the base and superstructure, independent of the entities that run it, profit off it, and regulate it. Independent of the violence of state (and independent of the US state’s particularly strong role, often hidden at every step of the way). What is all the state department narrative control and propaganda bots on social media but a form of censorship? You can’t route around that except by avoiding the places people are. Much in the same way you can ‘route around’ rental costs for apartments by living in a fridge box in the woods this isn’t a solution anyone would consider ideal as you’re just checking out and giving up. That culture died anyways, the idealized noble techno-anarchist hacker of the 90s has ceded to the white-collared reactionary tech worker of the 2010s and 2020s. They make their money invading people’s privacy ever more for private evil corporations and enjoy “shopping ethically” at upscale stores as their form of “activism”. Straight up recuperation at work and more proof unprincipled idealism gets you nowhere.
China’s great firewall works. And you better bet your ass I support it. It was never intended to stop everyone and it doesn’t, but it stops most, herds people back to stuff safe from western manipulation and propaganda and those who venture beyond tend to be a little savvier. And that’s what THIS bill is meant to do. This bill is not about controlling every last person, it’s about keeping enough of the opinion on their side and not allowing any significant percent of people to know the truth or anything but one of their various lies. In China you don’t get sent to prison for reposting RFA lies by itself. You get in trouble if too many people hear it and/or it causes problems as a result. But with this bill you wouldn’t get in trouble just if too many (a hundred say) Americans interact with your reposting of “enemy” media, you’d get in trouble for accessing it period, even in private in your room without telling a single person if technology can finger you. Straight to jail, big fines.
And that’s the issue. How do we continue to evangelize against imperialist propaganda when by doing so we risk admitting to committing a crime and/or inciting others to do the same? Your magical technology isn’t going to solve that. Most people don’t give a fuck about privacy. I mean I’d say at least 20% of US tiktok users legitimately think it’s a spying app for the Communist Party of China and their military and they still use it with a shrug despite how readily they can be prompted about how evil and dangerous China is because they don’t give a fuck about privacy or anything that involves effort beyond reaching for that which is in front of them within grasp. And the thing is they could have fixed that with a much less heavy-handed approach, several ways. That they’re going for this I think shows more panic, more of that liberal mask falling off.
Well for one I assume they would go after the payment processors and bank accounts of any VPN who didn’t cooperate and as a result many of the better VPNs would block American credit cards at the least if not entirely stop doing business with them OR censor and block what the US government wants for all American customers and claim it to be the lesser evil to stay in business.
Really should not underestimate the US’ ability to enforce this. They’re deep in bed with the ISPs already and compromised them. The tech companies likewise. The payment processor companies and the whole western financial system answers to them and if Visa gets an angry call to terminate relations with VPN-payment-systems-inc because they do business with VPN23 which allows Americans to access tiktok and Russian piracy sites and refused to hand over data they’re going to say yes sir and terminate the relationship and sink that business and by relation the VPN.
They can also go and hit the hosting providers of the VPN companies. Contrary to some people’s images, VPN servers are not located in bunkers in secret offices, they’re located in shared data-centers run by large western corporations and using the internet connections of same or similar large internet corporations that can be brought to heel with court orders, threats to profits, etc and forced to evict any non-cooperative VPN customers.
So they can see all US internet traffic already, so if you don’t use a VPN and try and access this stuff, your ISP could be required to rat you out and even if they weren’t, all the big ones would on principle anyways. If you do, see above.
I mean the US has a ton of tools here. They could have the NSA in an FBI jacket hack VPN companies (just call them Russian/Iranian/Chinese influence operations or whatever bullshit you want), gather lists of customers using it to violate this law, then shut the VPN down with one of those ugly “Seized by department of Justice” seal things and fine and arrest the users. Realistically it would be used on people doing other things they don’t like. e.g. being a communist online and using tiktok they’ll try for the maximum sentence for the violation of using tiktok or e.g. using a Russian piracy site which is obviously in their view stealing from American corporations and enabling a culture of Russians resisting sanctions on export of media to them and thus you’ll get a harsher sentence. The person bypassing it to post NATO propaganda and scream about tankies? Slap on the wrist if anything at all.
Really they kind of have to use it because they’re tying to set an example and precedent globally, to scare people off Chinese products to destroy them and their global market or at least bifurcate the world online tech ecosystem so you have a Chinese/Russian sphere and an American led NATO/EU sphere (plus sycophants in Asia of course) and never shall the two overlap as the American led sphere won’t allow it.
Maybe at first it will only be used lightly but with a tool like this the temptation to grab it and use it more and more as things go badly is going to be impossible to resist.
One more thing. It isn’t about stopping everyone. It’s about making it so only criminals and a few incredibly dedicated people bother to do this. These people self-select themselves into a heavily surveilled space where they are watched like hawks and arrested the moment something big can be manufactured to put them away for hard time or the moment some agency or politician needs a win against “foreign influences”.
If another bill they were considering around safe harbor and encryption (prompted of course by the think of the children screams from the friends of Jeffery Epstein) were to be brought forth and passed in the worst form, ISPs would most likely as a consequence start blocking all non-backdoored encryption including VPNs because they’d be held liable for any crimes committed if they couldn’t see the traffic and hand it over on demand. At that point it’s basically game over as the US internet would be more locked down than the internet in any other country I’m aware of that has widespread access.
Yeah and they would actually have reason to care as now not only are you depriving American corporations of their profits but you’re engaging in subversion of the American economy to benefit an enemy state. Like if you pirate and use the good Russian sites, you should be freaked the fuck out because they will inevitably go after or just happen to net pirates for using VPNs and throw them in the slammer for serious time as enemies of the state.
Looks like on /r/conspiracy they’re circling this back around to Jane Fonda funnily enough. Her statement about murder being needed to secure abortion rights and the school being a private Christian one. She really has been living the Maoist life, rent free in reactionary boomers’ brains for half a century now.
They are not a comrade. They’re a liberal who wants some welfare capitalism most likely but they’re not a comrade if they’re saying those things and like the horse-dong enthusiast streamer pedo.
Basically this person sounds like a social fascist to me. So approach them appropriately (rather than thinking them merely wayward but a communist as your post suggests which is emphatically false and must be rejected to understand where they are) understand what they are and understand you’re probably wasting your time compared to just talking to someone who isn’t a terminally online weirdo caught in a CIA streamer’s parasocial cult.
The well has already been poisoned for you so you have quite a bit of work if they’re deranged enough to call you a tankie. If you choose to work on them it’s going to take a lot of time, you’ll need good research skills, good debunking skills, and a lot of patience. No one is going to be able to hold your hand month after month and feed you points to rebut theirs and to educate them, this is a skill set you must have or be willing to develop or you should abandon this venture now. You should also understand it could easily take a year of unremitting replies, research, and so on to get anywhere and you could end up spending 8 months only for them to block you or otherwise shut it all down. They don’t seem like someone who will act in good faith, they have a preferred understanding of the world, a position in it (labor aristocracy of the imperial core) that is materially advantaged by rejecting your views and doubling down on support for empire.
You’ll have to send them info, be ready for it to be rejected, often out of hand without any real rebuttal other than “unreliable source because any reliable source would condemn the commies”. So part of your research should try and go for at least semi-neutral seeming (to them) sources for some things where possible. I would suggest trying to undermine the US and capitalist system instead, highlight the atrocities, the flaws, the lies, the propaganda, the false flags, the influence operations, the history of abuse of the working classes, the history of empowering and elevating reactionary including socially reactionary elements, and so on. I would begin with at least dragging their side down, bloodying the bourgeois media they like as untrustworthy or at least deeply compromised at many points and times and then pivoting to underscoring how the Soviet Union had real gains for its citizens, its pitfalls, the problems it faced including most of all the capitalist west attacks on it resulting in siege socialism.
Oh I’d also absolutely hammer them on their favorite streamer pedo with CIA characteristics with all the dirt on him as a first thing. If they don’t budge at all on that and supporting him/watching him/trusting him I’d say give it up until they do.
the US can’t outright ban it because they also profit from domestic spying and companies profit from ads and sponsorships
They can. Considering tik-tok already gave the US a compromise and it’s not exactly campaign season so Biden has no reason to posture -yet- over something like this, it seems they really want this.
They already have domestic spying covered. By removing it they funnel people into FB, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and every other American corporation with NSA/CIA/FBI “former” agent filled moderation teams and profits that entirely stay within the US as well as CEO’s who can be blackmailed, dragged in front of congress and humiliated, subjected to investigations and harassment if they don’t play ball in how they conduct business not just in the US, but abroad and that’s what the US really wants. It isn’t enough to control things within their borders, they must control global discourse, they must be able to control everyone everywhere with lopsided policies and exceptions for the US and no one else.
Recall that USAID (a CIA front) set up a social media site in Cuba for Cubans with the express intent of fomenting count-revolution. Keep in mind that other countries including Russia and China among others have expressed unease at the fact all the social media their citizens use is based in the US by companies who have CIA psyops on their teams, who white-list US bots while banning their own, who turn over data to the US but not other governments if the US doesn’t wish it. That’s the way the US expects things to be. They demand the right to control global discourse, to censor who they want, boost who they want, control the conversation, steer things for their benefit. And that’s what this is really about. An alternative in China existing is a direct threat to that model of total global hegemonic control of online discourse, especially of smaller countries than Russia/China who have no way to field alternatives.
Those ad dollars aren’t going to vanish as most people addicted to it will go to another platform or spend time on another platform with ads. That’s not even mentioning the overarching metadata collection of the NSA bulk surveillance programs which can tell you a lot of things.
They already can do all those things, this is just cutting out any benefit to China.
The spying and manipulation of people by natsec psyops was already happening before tik-tok was ever a thing. If they removed it, it would still continue. The teenagers using it aren’t going to go all unabomber and disconnect from the net and start collecting firearms and preparing for a revolution. They’ll be angry, maybe protest a little but ultimately either go to other US controlled bubble social media or use less social media in which case their information, their views are still informed by the dominant superstructure and its propaganda. There is no lose for the US here by sabotaging a rival.
Most likely if it comes down to it the company in China will sell and take some money rather than refuse to sell and lose the entire US (plus probably domino effect on Europe which will ban it like good pawns, etc) and vassal states of same costing them a market of oh say more than half a billion people.
I don’t even think that’s the problem. I’m pretty sure they’re nearly fully cooperating it’s just:
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They don’t feel comfortable letting a Chinese company know their exact psy-op strategies which they need to in order to implement them for them unlike say Twitter, Facebook, etc which they trust to do this.
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they don’t want successful Chinese brands or companies operating internationally. It threatens their existing psyops that they own 100% such as FB/Twitter/etc and gives Chinese a good name and a foot in the door with the global youth in terms of experiences with Chinese brands and properties.
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Propaganda value: They want to fearmonger and whip up fear about anything Chinese tech related. Chinese networking products and 5G are a threat to national security they scream, this is a threat to national security they scream. They just want to crush anything Chinese as part of their contain, encircle, and de-couple push. They do not want China being allowed to grow and interlink more with the global high-tech world and by doing this they’re sending a message to vassals and everyone else.
And the funny thing is tik-tok already complied with that demand for the US. Oracle stores all data in the US for them and they also hired a ton of natsec spooks onto their US team who no doubt influence curation of content. This is just plain banditry and an attempt to seize or destroy a popular Chinese property. If they sell the US will expand the presence worldwide and add it to their collection of surveillance and influence operations known as social media. If they refuse and take the ban the US screaming about it being a Chinese spy app will grow even louder as they try and bully other countries to also ban it to thwart it.
Piratebay is not safe for software. Even trusted users distribute malware there.
For videos it’s not that great either unless what you want was released in 2015 and has been seeded continuously since then.
Check this: https://www.reddit.com/r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH/wiki/index
As to sites 1337x and rarbg are best for such content. (make sure you spell those right as there are typosquatter domains a number/letter off that give out malware).
Rutracker (dot org, there’s a dot ru as well which I still don’t know the reasoning behind but it’s not as good) tends to have the best stuff for music albums. For software read, read, read up on that linked subreddit wiki about what is and isn’t trusted and safe and even then beware, the threat landscape is much, much worse, far more people bundling malware these days than back then.