debanqued @ debanqued @beehaw.org

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119

Joined

3 yr. ago

You say for suspicious users, but for the 4-month stretch of beehaw being unreachable there was no opportunity to login. So there was apparently a user agnostic systemwide change.

It’s worse than being reversible. The problem is that it’s unprovable. A switch from “zero logging” to “log everything” is wholly undetectible to users. You have to rely on blind faith that a profit-driven entity will act in your interest and resist their opportunity to profit from data collection. All you have is trust. Tor avoids that whole dicey mess and reliance on trust.

Indeed the ISP can only see where you go when using TLS, and that data can be aggregated to who you are along with everywhere else you go. It’s sensitive enough that in the US lawmakers decided on whether ISPs need consent to collect that info. Obama signed into force a requirement of ISPs to get consent. Then Trump reversed that. Biden did not reverse it back AFAIK.

W.r.t VPNs, you merely shift the surveillance point; you do not avoid the surveillance. The VPN provider can grab all that info just as well.

I am anonymous. Only doxxing experts know who is behind my account. Using clearnet makes it trivially simple for doxxers. Activitypub msgs include the IP address of the sending source which anyone with their own instance can see, IIRC.

But note as well Tor offers more than anonymity. It mitigates tracking by your ISP.

lemm.ee is centralized in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden. I can’t speek for the admins but it’s antithetical to the purpose of the fedi to advocate for federation with centralized hosts.

And there are consequences. If an image is posted to Lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, or discuss.online, those of us who are excluded from Cloudflare cannot see it. A non-CF node federating to a CF node creates a broken network.

If I recall correctly, the main reason we defederated from those instances at the time was the sheer volume of spam we were getting from users of those instances.

Good point (if that’s true). I can’t help but expose the irony of instances centralized under Cloudflare having a spam problem. It seems to show that those instances sold their sole to the devil only to not get the benefits of the devil’s offer.

I don’t want to be an enabler of the drivel, so without posting the full URL to that article that’s reachable in the open free world, I will just say that medium.com links should never be publicly shared outside of Cloudflare’s walled garden. I realise aussie.zone is also in Cloudflare’s walled garden, but please be aware that it’s federated and reaches audiences who are excluded by Cloudflare.

The medium.com portion of the URL should be replaced by scribe.rip to make a medium article reachable to everyone. Though I must say this particular article doesn’t need any more reach than it has.

Anyone who just wants the answer: see @souperk@reddthat.com’s comment in this thread.

A website isn’t a common carrier

We were talking about network neutrality, not just common carriers (which are only part of the netneutrality problem).

you cannot argue that a website isn’t allowed to control who they serve their content to.

Permission wasn’t the argument. When a website violates netneutrality principles, it’s not a problem of acting outside of authority. They are of course permitted to push access inequality assuming we are talking about the private sector where the contract permits it.

Cloudflare is a tool websites use to exercise that right,

One man’s freedom is another man’s oppression.

necessitated by the ever rising prevalence of bots and DDoS attacks.

It is /not/ necessary to use a tool as crude and reckless as Cloudflare to defend from attacks with disregard to collateral damage. There are many tools in the toolbox for that and CF is a poor choice favored by lazy admins.

Your proposed definition of net neutrality would destroy anyone’s ability to deal with these threats.

Only if you neglect to see admins who have found better ways to counter threats that do not make the security problem someone elses.

Can you at least provide examples of legitimate users who are hindered by the use of Cloudflare?

That was enumerated in a list in the linked article you replied to.

On a serious note, plenty of people here surely know what net neutrality is. Net neutrality is the guarantee that your ISP doesn’t (de-)prioritize traffic or outright block traffic, all packets are treated equally.

That’s true but it’s also the common (but overly shallow) take. It’s applicable here and good enough for the thread, but it’s worth noting that netneutrality is conceptually deeper than throttling and pricing games and beyond ISP shenanigans. The meaning was coined by Tim Wu, who spoke about access equality.

People fixate on performance which I find annoying in face of Cloudflare, who is not an ISP but who has done by far the most substantial damage to netneutrality worldwide by controlling who gets access to ~50%+ of world’s websites. The general public will never come to grasp Cloudflare’s oppression or the scale of it, much less relate it to netneutrality, for various reasons:

• Cloudflare is invisible to those allowed inside the walled garden, so its existence is mostly unknown
• The masses can only understand simple concepts about their speed being throttled. Understanding the nuts and bolts of discrimination based on IP address reputation is lost on most.
• The US gov is obviously pleased that half the world’s padlocked web traffic is trivially within their unwarranted surveillance view via just one corporation in California. They don’t want people to realize the harm CF does to netneutrality and pressure lawmakers to draft netneutrality policy in a way that’s not narrowly ISP-focused.

Which means netneutrality policy is doomed to ignore Cloudflare and focus on ISPs.

Most people at least have some control over which ISP they select. Competition is paltry, but we all have zero control over whether a website they want to use is in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden.

Why would it necessarily have to be federal law, and not state law?

/cc @ulkesh@beehaw.org

Whether the legislation is appropriate at the state or fed domain is unclear. Certainly if the orange tyrant takes power again, I would probably want state govs to be able to protect consumers from netneutrality abuses.

It’s worth noting that the FCC’s so-called “Open” Internet Advisory Committee (#OIAC) tragically gives two seats on the board to:

• Cloudflare
• Comcast

Both of whom are abusers of #netneutrality, especially Cloudflare. A well-informed Trump-free administration should be showing Cloudflare and Comcast the door ASAP.

Sure, Trump would just bring them back. But it’d at least be a good symbolic move.

Indeed, as someone else pointed out, the needed change should come from pro-netneutrality legislation. And the legislation needs to be broad enough to block Cloudflare’s broad discriminatory arbitrary attack on access equality, not just tinker with speeds at the ISP consumer level.

It’s not a topic issue. The discussions are largely around platforms and custodians. They bring lots of ethical problems. Anything on this page is relevant to personal finance:

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/usa_banks.md

If someone managing their personal finances wants to ask how to avoid the bad players and still achieve their goals, it’s relevant. But Bogleheads is not keen. I don’t recall the particulars (it was over a decade ago) but it wasn’t topic related. It was just a conservative moderator or crowd who don’t want ethics getting in their way or cluttering their view.

Tor. I wonder if that is a more fraud or trolling concern. Or maybe for financial houses more of a US law concern.

Certainly not a legal issue in the US. Tor works ATM on Bogleheads. Cloudflare is often chosen out of ignorance by admins who don’t even know what Tor is, or at least don’t know that most Tor traffic is legit. It’s usually a lazy move. I don’t recall the details about Boglehead’s tor hostility but they’re reachable over Tor right now.

I used the Bogleheads forum over 15 years ago. It eventually turned sour and I left.

One of my issues is that the banking and finance sector and consumers engaging in it are conservatives. So if you want to ask a question like “where can I find a relatively ethical bank/investment firm that does not invest in fossil fuels?” it’s alienating to right-wingers to consider ethics. They don’t see the ethical problems that plague the industry and at the same time they don’t recognize the concept of ethical consumption. They just expect everyone to look after number 1. Bogleheads had little tolerance for politics, which inherently forces a narrow discussion of what financial products bring what value to the selfish types of consumers who neglect ethics. They don’t want someone exposing JP Morgan’s investment in private prisons or fossil fuels, or even how JPM Chase has a sneaky anti-Tor policy to discover which of their customers use Tor. Bogleheads did not kill my account.. it was just that ethical topics either had crickets or hostility, and censorship. IIRC what ultimately drove me off was Bogleheads started blocking Tor or using Cloudflare or something that demonstrated disrespect for digital rights. But apparently they re-liberated their forums since it seems Tor is permitted again.

For medical chatter I would look at mander.xyz, which is science focused.

For law it’s a bit of a ghost town, but at least there is a ghost town ready to host interested litigants→ links.esq.social

There is !personalfinance@sopuli.xyz, which would be somewhat related to personal tax. There is also a Lemmy instance dedicated to finance. I don’t recall it off the top of my head but the instance joined Cloudflare so I immediately abandoned it.

For the record, lemmy.ml is a terrible place to discuss tax or personal finance. The admins of that instance treat personal finance questions as spam and even go over the heads of moderators to censor such discussion because of their political baggage. IMO sopuli.xyz might be a good place to create an account and create finance communities.

You’re talking about Republicans but then saying “state” is a generic word.

I’m saying when I personally used the word “state” in the bit that you quoted, I was using the generic meaning of state. It’s an overloaded word (multiple meanings). What I mean by the “generic meaning” is that I was not referring to the state level jurisdiction. E.g. if the context were Texas, my use of the word “state” was not the state of Texas in that quote. The word state can simply mean government at any level. A federal government (aka nation state) can also generically be referred to as the “state”, even though it’s not state as the jurisdictional construct that composes the United States.

Likewise, even a local government like a city or county can be generically called the “state”. So to answer your question, the state of Texas can ban welfare checks from the state level in the whole state of Texas, but a lower (non-republican controlled) government can circumvent that by offering food and shelter instead of checks.

Welfare can happen at any level. I went to the emergency room and racked up a 4-figure hospital bill, and said “I have no insurance or income”. It was no problem.. the county had financial aid that I qualified for. The county paid the bill for me, not the state¹ or fed.

1. in that case, I mean state in the sense of a jurisdictional construct.

And to be clear, the use of “state” in your quote was the generic sense of the word.

(emphasis added)

The local govs taking direct action. The state gov may be controlled by human rights hostile republicans at the state level, but there are many smaller governments within the state controlled by liberals.

And to be clear, the use of “state” in your quote was the generic sense of the word.

I mean, again, you’re claiming if Republicans get rid of minimum wage

Min wage is entirely different than what these bans are about. There are no wages in this context. This is about a flat periodic income for non-wage earners for the most part.

then they’ll have to come up with some state-sponsored plan to get Bob his shoes when the inevitable wage reduction makes shoes even more unaffordable.

You’re confused about how these bans work. If they don’t want to give Bob a flat living income from state funds at the state level, a ban is pointless because they can simply neglect to provide the money (as they already control the policy and money at the state level). The purpose of a ban is to prevent lower governments from acting. So if they implement a state-level statute banning Bob getting min income, city/county X can cannot give Bob a min income but they can still buy Bob a pair of shoes. Hence how it can backfire.

I’ve seen public libraries with sewing machines. So for example a librarian could theoretically use it to help Bob construct a pair of shoes using material that’s supplied by public money to the libraries. Such an outcome is a game of whack-a-mole.. The republicans would have to discover that’s happening and then legislate against it separately.