The Closure of the Internet

Freespeechers 8 Comments

Until 2015, an optimistic and liberal (in the best sense) ethos pervaded the Internet. Major Internet platforms were open and had little content policy beyond bans on real-life criminal activity (stalking, selling illegal goods, child pornography, etc). Aside from these narrow and reasonable explicit exceptions, anyone could go online and converse with interested people around the world about whatever they wanted in public. These platforms had no real means to control what people talked about on them even if they wanted to, which they didn’t; to the extent an organization can have views all believed in free1 and open online discourse, which promised to make censorship impossible and end the hegemony of 20th century broadcast media.

In this, they were backed up by major non-tech institutions, such as the UN, the EU, the US State Department, and the New York Times, all of which saw Internet freedom as a corollary of offline freedom, and one which would liberalize the world’s remaining non-democratic states in time. These institutions both supported Internet freedom rhetorically and spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating and disseminating technical tools to evade Internet censorship and preserve online anonymity.

I remember the old internet. It was a better place.

Thought Experiment: Jason Arday’s Path from Villain to Hero

Baiting The Left Protected Class Vast Right Wing Conspiracy 6 Comments

Cambridge professor Jason Arday recently resigned in disgrace, under a cloud of numerous plagiarism accusations. He’s down & out forever, right? I thought so, but in this discussion today between Bret Weinstein and Peter Boghossian, the former suggested a trump card that Arday could still play and instantly become a hero … at least to those of us who believe in truth. Hint: If you want to skip ahead to the big reveal, advance the video to about 17 minutes in.

Keir Starmer’s Britain

Claws of the Panda It's Probably Nothing 9 Comments

Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and incompetence has a long tail…

Royal Navy spy drones used by Britain’s elite special forces secretly sent data to China, The Telegraph can reveal.

The cameras on the K3 Scout surveillance drones had components made in China which were secretly transmitting information to a device in the country.

The Royal Marines have been using the £12m fleet since March and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was forced to remove all internet connectivity from the cameras after discovering the breach.

The revelation raises fears that Beijing has been attempting to spy on Britain’s military after years of security warnings about the threat from the country.

The drones were supplied by a major British defence contractor, Kraken Technology Group, which sourced the cameras from a third party who had given assurances about their security.[…]

A defence source familiar with the matter told The Telegraph that the K3 drones made up part of a future defence package offered by the UK to secure the freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.

The source said that preparations for Britain’s plans in the Gulf had been conducted on the drones, adding: “This is major failure to check origins of components and we have lost confidence in the platform.”

There are also concerns that the surveillance drones have been near highly sensitive meetings between senior special forces staff, and that cameras remained active even when the drones were switched off.

And In Cross-Dressing-Men-Relocating-Faeces News

I, Napoleon 6 Comments

The shimmering vision of womanliness seen above is Mr Lucy Rose Shaftain-Fenner, a filmmaker whose films are, it turns out, chiefly about himself, and whose interests include the “liberation” of Palestine, violating women’s boundaries, and “taxing wealth.”

When not declaring his personal hotness, Mr Shaftain-Fenner engages in many feats of radicalism, including cutting up Harry Potter DVDs in an attempt to reduce the number of future Harry Potter fans, intruding in women’s toilets, denouncing the misogyny and catcalling he allegedly endures, and listing his quite numerous mental health shortcomings.

So, hey, nothing to worry about, ladies.

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