• 2 Posts
  • 7 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: December 5th, 2019
  • cipherpunk@lemmy.mltoAnnouncements@lemmy.ml•This is an Antifa instance
    23·
    4 years ago

    I can’t see which post you’re replying to. These thread lines are an optical illusion.

    Antifa’s method of activism is controversial

    While there is nothing controversial about being anti-racist, Antifa is not simply anti-racist. It’s the style of activism that’s controversial. From wikipedia:

    Antifa is an anti-fascist political movement in the United States[2][3][4][5] comprising a diverse[6][7] array of autonomous groups that aim to achieve their objectives through the use of both non-violent and violent direct action rather than through policy reform.[8][9][10][11] Antifa political activists engage in protest tactics such as digital activism and militancy,[11][12] sometimes involving property damage, physical violence and harassment, against fascists, racists and the far-right

    Petitioning for policy reform is relatively non-controversial. But that’s not Antifa. Obviously some of the more extreme actions (e.g. violence and property destruction) are controversial - and Antifa is open to them.

    Antifa’s ideology is controversial

    Components of Antifa ideology:

    • anti-racism (non-controversial of course)
    • anti-capitalism (obviously controversial and IMO unpopular)
    • anarchy (obviously controversial and IMO unpopular)

    I can’t even get my head around how it’s possible to be both anti-capitalist and anarchist at the same time. Anarchy is also favored by the extreme right, and obviously anarchy is a recipe for pure uncontrolled capitalism – most oppressive form of capitalism. What am I missing?

    Lemmy censorship

    In the case of lemmy.ml leadership, what we see is extreme censorship. We’re not just talking censorship of trashy messages. I recently posted a thread on the status of the cock.li email servers, and it was censored because the word “cock” appeared in the domain name. (proof). Obviously it’s essential to mention the domain name of the service we’re talking about.

    No one will care if racist msgs get censored, but any post that’s incompatible with an anti-capitalist or anti-government viewpoint is also likely to be censored when you see how fast and loose they are with the censor trigger.

  • cipherpunk@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•*Permanently Deleted*
    1·
    5 years ago

    Because otherwise they would have virtually no money at all, and thus shut down

    ACLU, EFF, & Tor all pre-date Paypal’s existence. No, they don’t “need” Paypal for survival.

    (see what happened when WikiLeaks when major payment providers blocked them), because, unfortunately, almost everyone uses those payment methods at the moment.

    This proves my point. Wikileaks was not just blocked by Paypal, it was blocked by credit cards as well. Despite the massive blockade, Wikileaks survived.

    Paypal is the biggest offender of payment blockades (particularly political in nature and biased in favor of Peter Thiel’s right-wing agenda), which only advances the point that we have an ethical duty to shrink Paypal.

    And if you think about the word ethical, what would you qualify as so?

    By my own standard it’s unethical for any org or person to accept Paypal, but I’m not applying my own standards here in the context you’re replying to. I’m applying the standards of the orgs themselves. Paypal works against ACLU’s own mission. Paypal works against EFF’s own mission. Notice that I did not name countless vendors of electronics, bicycle parts, etc that accept Paypal, because Paypal doesn’t contradict their mission.

    It’s one thing to hold everyone to your own standard, but if you can’t hold an organization to their own ethical principles something is wrong.

    I mean, their main sponsor by far is CIA, what else is here to say?

    First of all, the Navy invented Tor, so if you have a problem with a nation having an intelligence agency or military then you’re advocating against Tor’s creator.

    There are countless free software projects that operate without a dime because people who need that software have an interest in contributing maintenance code. If Tor Project were to hypothetically get zero funding, you might see little or no outreach programs, Tor stickers, and marketing frills, but the software would live on.

    I don’t have a bank account, nor do I have PayPal, so I’m not really sure about that, but from what I know it’s a lot more convenient to pay with PayPal than it is to pay from a traditional bank account. But again, not sure about this…

    Convenience is the top rationalization for unethical conduct and transactions. It also has the least merit.

    lol what? How? I mean, you really only need to leave your Bitcoin address… that’s weird…

    Things have changed, so my comment is no longer relevant. In the past, Tor Project did not publish a BTC address. Donors were forced to go to a CloudFlare site and do the transaction through a 3rd party (bitpay.com). It was an absolute embarrassment for Tor Project and there was a long bug report about it. The bug report lingered for years but it seems to have been deleted– likely due to the embarrassment. They claimed that they could not simply let BTC enter because they need to make a tax declaration on what they receive, and the tax declaration must be in a national currency. So they used a 3rd party who instantly converted all their bitcoin donations into national currency for accounting purposes. They foolishly chose a CloudFlare site to do that. Seems to be history now. They are using btcpayserver.org and superficially i see no issues there.

    It’s worth noting that Tor Project has a record of not eating their own dog food. Apart from subjecting ppl to CloudFlare sites, their bug tracker has a history of mistreating Tor users, and if you try to subscribe to their newsletter using an onion email address they can’t handle it.

  • cipherpunk@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•*Permanently Deleted*
    0·
    5 years ago

    correction: these projects need as much money as they can ethically get. When their mission is inherently ethical in nature, tossing out ethics (ethics of their own mission) defeats their own purpose and undermines their credibility. They’re subjecting unwitting donors to civil liberties abuses. You don’t do that to your supporters – the people trying to help out.

    ACLU and EFF only need money from Americans, since they only benefit Americans. They must have US bank accounts to deposit the Paypal money into, and their US based donors also necessarily have US bank accounts. So check & ACH wire are inherently available. And in most cases credit card is also a common option for US-based donors & recipients. Adding Paypal is purely adding to the privacy abuse.

    Tor Project are simply sellouts. They never turn down money. They’ve accepted donations from DDG and Reddit. Tor Project has a strong presence in the US and Germany. Nixing Paypal does not hinder conventional US or European payment methods. I’m not sure how much of their funding comes from Russia or Asia but at a very minimum they could restrict the Paypal option to the regions that need it. Note as well the Torproject accepts bitcoin and they do so in a manner that ironically subjects donors to a CloudFlare site (the top adversary of the Tor Project). They’re simply reckless.

    FSF is essentially US-based and serving the US. FSFE covers Europe. Other regions benefit incidentally from FSF, FSFE,Protonmail, & Framasoft. In any case, they too could limit Paypal to non-US-EU payments.

  • cipherpunk@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Is Signal Messenger Secure?
    1·
    5 years ago

    Anonymity IS privacy. Specifically, anonymity is privacy of identity. So no, it’s not two different concepts. It’s a subset/superset relationship of the same thing.

    Calling “privacy” and “anonymity” two different concepts is an attempt to downplay the importance of anonymity. The problem is that you never have absolute privacy, and when privacy is attacked or lost for one reason or another you better have anonymity. You should think of anonymity as a 2nd layer of protection from disclosure.

  • cipherpunk@lemmy.mlOPtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•DDG vs. Startpage vs. Searxes
    1·
    5 years ago

    Mojeek does their own crawling. That’s quite impressive, because unlike DDG it means they don’t have to choose from a pool of privacy abusers to buy search results. I did a test search on “petition sites” and was impressed that the first page did not contain the typical privacy abusing cloudflare results (change.org, moveon.org, etc). Mojeek also does not buy hosting from Amazon/MS/Google. I should perhaps add them to the table.

    I didn’t know MetaGer was free software. I occasionally use metager.com but my first port of call is Searxes b/c searxes filters out cloudflare sites.