> In Germany, we have the Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) - literally 'Copyright Clearinghouse for the Internet', a private organization that decides what websites to block, corporate interests rewriting our free internet. No judges, no transparency, just a bunch of ISPs and major copyright holders deciding what your eyes can see.
> The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
CUII is saying that they enforce court orders. I guess that language doesn't preclude them from also blocking other sites.
The blogpost is from February, since then, the CUII switched from arbitrarily decide on blocks through an internal group "until the court order arrives" to strictly include the domains from court orders.
So yes, they USED to just block whenever they wanted, based on "previous similar cases" but without a court order (or a pending one). They then got a lot of flak from the regulatory bodies and switched to actually only include court ordered blocks.
> The Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet (CUII) is an independent body in Germany. It was founded by German internet access providers and copyright holders to objectively examine whether the blocking of access to a given structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany is lawful. When copyright holders submit an application, a review board examines whether the relevant requirements are met. If they are, the review board then recommends a DNS-block of the structurally copyright-infringing website in question. Every recommendation of the review committee must be unanimous and only apply to clear cases of copyright infringement. The recommendation is then forwarded to the German Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railways (Bundesnetzagentur - BNetzA). If the examination by the BNetzA does not reveal any concerns about the DNS-block according to the provisions of the EU Net Neutrality Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2015/2120), the CUII then informs the internet access providers and the applicants accordingly. In such cases, the internet access providers participating in the CUII then block the corresponding domains of the structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany.
> The CUII now only coordinates blocks between ISPs after a court order. That's it. No more secret votes. No more corporate censorship. The new version of their website says: "The CUII coordinates the conduct of judicial blocking proceedings and the implementation of judicial blocking orders."
> Is it usually this easy for corporations to get you to believe they are the good guys?
I don't get your point.
What is written on the website of some company/organization/... when writing about itself, is what the respective company/organization/... wants you to believe about it. It should be trivial for you to recognize that what this company/organization/... wants you to believe about it can be very different from what you desire to find as truth about it.
It's like if I wrote: "aleph_minus_one is the greatest human that ever lived on earth." Do you now seriously believe that just because I wrote this about myself, it must be the truth?! :-)
The title is misleading. They didn’t block the author’s site’s DNS. They blocked their own site’s DNS to figure out how the author’s site determines their DNS blacklist. Then they changed strategy.
How can they tell the difference between the CUII giving up and the CUII just saying that they have given up once they successfully found a way to conceal the blocks from the people checking?
There's no need to tell the difference between those, because the CUII has neither given up nor have they said that they have given up. They'll continue to block the kinds of websites they've been blocking and add new ones to the list, and they'll do so under court order, because the kinds of websites they've been blocking are the ones they're legally required to block. They've been accused of overblocking, but only in the weak sense of uselessly blocking domains that had already been taken down by other means. That will continue to happen with the courts in the loop, because there might be a takedown between the submission of evidence and the court order coming into effect.
Traditionally in the west, censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business.
Fast forward to today, Americans are pushing you for self censorship through force and denial(if you don’t speak in line with the admin, you will have hard time in your US public sector job or if you want to travel to US) and Europeans find all kind of other ways.
Tough new world order. I used to be advocating for resolution through legal/political means, but now I'm inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control. Nobody wants loose ends. Everyone is terrified of some group of people will do something to them, freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only. The guy who says want to make humans interplanetary species is posing with people detained for traveling on the planet without permission. Just forget about it.
So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.
> I used to be advocating for resolution through legal means, but now I inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control.
I came to a similar conclusion, what happened in the 90s and early 2000s is since the govs had restricted freedom in the physical/real world a lot of young people took refuge in the Internet.
It became harder for an individual to build his own house or start a business, but you could make a website pretty much free from regulations and impediments.
But governments and a lot of interested parties slowly invested the Internet and now we are complaining it sucks.
The common Internet and web suck anyway now because it is full of bots, AI generated content, hard to search and you need to prove you are a human every 5 minutes.
We need to create new networks and places just because it is fun and it will take some time for the govs to follow us there: freenet, yggdrasil, alfis, gemini, reticulum, B.A.T.M.A.N, etc.
I’m in the U.S. and am not aligned with what’s happening to freedom.
Taking a step back, I support the ideals (the good ones at least) of what I’d perceived that our country was founded on. I also support the individual people in our police and military, but not the fascist orders that they’re having to fulfill. I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general, I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
This is a predicament, because it’s like you’re driving the bus and a fascist jumps into your lap with a gun to your head and takes the wheel, while he has others put guns to the head of your family and others on the bus. No one asked for this, and I still feel like there are many that believe that there is nothing we can do and that it will take care of itself. But the gerrymandering law that just passed in Texas, on top of everything else that was already in place, is another warning that this won’t go away on its own.
I get what you’re saying about sending people to space, but I think that being able to get off our big rock if we can do so without destroying other life and other places in the universe is worth time and effort. Even natives that lived with the land and life that existed had to move sometimes, life and all that exists physically that has space is to some degree nomadic.
I doubt a lot of the individuals doing these actions, like police or ICE, don’t believe in this. They signed up for these jobs, and votes last year show many of them heartily endorse and believe in these policies.
The national guard, though, probably didn’t sign up to be the backdrop for political ads and a lot of FBI, DEA, etc. agents signed up to work on major crimes rather than busting someone’s landscaper.
Folks doing those duties and jobs should know that these organizations are parts of the executive role and remit of the president. They signed up to do whatever the president orders them to do. Officers have a somewhat different oath, but the chain of command is still abundantly clear to all involved.
> I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
Check out "Ordinary Men" by Christopher R. Browning.
> So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.
It's tough to imagine what this might look like. I suspect it's too late.
Device attestation is becoming more prevalent, and required for increasingly more functionality. Passkeys are breathing down our necks.
Alternate protocols can only exist if the corporate and governmental powers look the other way. We have Signal and VPNs and BitTorrent and tor, but for how long?
And moreover, does it even matter what protocols we want to use, if most of us use devices that are fully controlled by the tech giants who want to do the censorship?
I don't know if there are particular good ground-level solutions to infrastructure (mesh networks can have their application but are difficult to drive critical mass adoption and every square inch of mesh network has "last mile" problems).
Ideally you would have good government involvement to enforce traffic neutrality, but that's out the door. I'm sure this has been talked to death but ground level P2P infrastructure is what I would be rooting for.
Interesting point. There’s wide acceptance of commercial censorship, but censorship for the common good (rightfully) feels like a slippery slope. But are they actually so different? Couldn’t the latter be done in a way just as purposeful? Or does it always lead to loss of freedom disproportional to its goals?
I don't think that there's difference, just implementation details differ. Youtube was blocked in Turkey for many years because someone from Germany uploaded defamatory videos about Ataturk(illegal in TR) and it was considered protected speech and Germany & Google refused deleting those. The situation was resolved when someone copyrighted Ataturk in Germany and made Youtube remove these videos.
Besides copyright, especially among Americans, I find that its completely O.K. to censor content it is bad for business. A major one is censorship in order to be advertisement friendly but anything flies, even the guy owns the thing and can do whatever he pleases is good enough for many(slightly controversial).
This is a myth: in Germany, as in many other countries, copyright covers only specific expression; you cannot copyright either the name of a historical person or a topic of discourse. The videos were briefly taken down as an automatic response to a complaint, but it seems the complaint was not upheld and the videos were restored.
At the time, Germany had a law censoring insulting comments about foreign heads of state, but that only applied to living ones (and maybe only those in office at the time?) That law was repealed in 2018.
The videos remained blocked in Turkey, but on account of a specific law banning criticism of Ataturk, not copyright.
Okay, how this changes the core argument? The videos were not taken down briefly because they did not comply with the Turkish law that protects Ataturk from defamation but for the claim that they violated someones commercial interests.
The video wasn't taken down over commercial interests. They were taken down because some old law prohibited insults at representatives of other nations, with whom Germany has diplomatic relationships.
We do accept „censorship“ if it follows due process based on clear and well-intended laws. Think taking down piracy sites, child porn, slander.
But CUII is formed by a private oligopoly, with anonymous judges, implementing vague rules, trying to keep secret even what they block. All while limiting what the vast majority of Germans (who don’t know what DNS is) can access on the internet.
IMO that’s the issue.
Would you ban all propaganda? Russian propaganda? Propaganda from countries engaged in illegal wars? How many social media or news sites survive? Heck, how many sites that allow comments and user interaction survive?
Yours is the "think of the children" argument, makes you feel warm and fuzzy when it aligns with your interests but you won't have a leg to stand on by the time it's used against you. Banning is just sweeping some of the trash under the carpet. The ones wielding the ban hammer don't care that most of the trash is still out in the open (social media?), they just need to open the door to arbitrary banning. The ones applauding the ban hammer are lacking the same critical thing that would otherwise handle propaganda and misinformation very well: education.
If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack on a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
Meanwhile all the RT type crap is flooding social media under thousands of names. But that's fine as long as enough rubes are tricked into thinking banning one site did anything to solve the propaganda issue.
It’s just not as black-and-white as you say. Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom in my country and the EU on a daily basis. Should we invest in education (that is generally already reasonably good, IIUC)? Should we leave it to commercial journalism, even the best of which are moving to clickbait headlines? Should we do nothing?
> "Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom"
What's "freedom" mean if not the right to read any publication you want, including (especially!*) media from hostile foreign countries? It's cynical to attack core civil liberties and say that you are doing so in defense of liberty.
*This is the most obvious thing in the world, IMHO, if you look at the general category, and ask yourself what you think about it when the actors are switched around. If China bans its citizens from reading the New York Times (it does), is that a human rights violation—or is it a simple exercise of sovereignty? When North Korea sends people into labor camps for possessing South Korean television shows (it does), is there a colorable case that *their* national security justifies that? Or is that totally out of the question?
One'd have to twist themselves into pretzels to plead exceptionalism for their own country doing anything of this category.
(There's a further subtext that anyone on HN knows how to trivially circumvent such blocks, so, these rules inherently can never apply to HN commenters, ourselves—it's always other people, we'd wish to apply these rules to).
For one it runs into paradox of tolerance problems, for another it fallaciously relies on a "marketplace of ideas" to resolve friction which, despite the bumper sticker term, is not a real mechanism.
It's been a longstanding part of the fascist playbook to turn the norms of liberalism against itself, advocating for "free speech" when it helps actively amplify their message to audiences, and having no hesitation to abandon those purported principles once in power and able to censor opponents. Poof, there goes your free speech.
Principle agnostic approaches to freedom of expression lead to the collapse of democracies. Happened in Hungary, almost happened in Poland, and it's unfolding in the U.S. The point isn't that these idea's "win" in a marketplace of ideas but that they mobilize violent anti-democratic capacity.
So then let me ask you, do you feel like arbitrarily banning sites worked? Are we having less of a propaganda and misinformation as we are going ahead with the bans? Because if it's not actually working it sounds a lot like "it's not helping but at least it looks like we're doing something".
The problem is just getting bigger because 1) we aren't actually doing anything else (real) about it and 2) we even actively allow propaganda and misinformation on so many other channels it's laughable.
I said above, the people doing the banning just need a vehicle to carry their interests and justify their banning powers. Since they don't care about the problem itself, they don't care about any of the real measures that could tackle it. They pick the only one which gives them what they really want: power to arbitrarily control information. Russia is a great excuse today (and honestly, almost throughout their history) but it will be used against you tomorrow.
You don't even have to dig too far to see the exact same type of propaganda freely spread on X or Facebook, where the people actually are. RT is happily active there. Far right Musk is there. Can you even pretend that banning the rt.com site in Germany does anything towards the goal of curbing disinformation?
The fact that some kids will still find ways to get them would be at least partially addressed by the "education" part of GP's comment. Even then, of course, some kids will still start smoking. Is that some kind of argument that we shouldn't do anything, or...?
> Is that some kind of argument that we shouldn't do anything, or...?
You keep trying to make it sound like we are doing "both". In reality we aren't doing the thing that works, and keep doing the thing that doesn't. The proof is that we live in a world with more disinformation on more channels than ever, while education is cratering.
So I guess the question is why are you pretending we're doing something useful about this? Why are you pretending the useless measure we keep applying needs to be applied nonetheless? Who convinced you that banning solves the problem when reality shows things getting worse and that if we pretend we "do both" it's as if we actually did?
I see no way to have censorship and freedom and common good at the same time, so good of society is out of question - unless you don't value freedom at all.
It is a tool that entrenches current powers that be, system wise. Who decides what the "common" good is? the one in power.
It also hides societal problems and signals that could be used for policymaking.
The acceptance of censorship honestly scares me, and i grew up on stories of oppressive communist regime - full of censorship, secret police etc.
and frankly, commercial censorship might be even worse - it is a "for profit" enterprise, common good be damned.
and one last thing - even if you fully trust your current government, you're just one elections away from something vastly different. They will have access to the same powers that you've granted them(indirectly, by voting).
imho that is just silly ... I can see various ways censorship and freedom and common good at the same time. Actually, I can imagine different set ups where this could work...
But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?
On the other topic, I for one think that censorship of AI generated content and fake news, as well as AI generated ordering of results should be censored. But it's not that easy, and implementing that is an even bigger can of worms.
>Traditionally in the west censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business.
To me, those 2 sentences contradict each other. Doing it through copyright rights, and doing it for money and business sound pretty much the same to me. But you're saying that traditionally one wasn't considered censorship, but the other was considered censorship.
Censorship is state/company mandated retraction or blockage of certain information. Copyright is state/company mandated blocking of certain forms of expression.
Copyright permits you to publish any idea you so desire, only that you don't plagiarize someone else while doing so. (Which is always possible, as the fair-use doctrine is a thing)
Copyright is definitely not censorship, Copyright is the framework implemented to create intellectual properties to allow for commercial exploitation of text, sound, images and some other intellectual output(details depend on jurisdiction).
Removal of content due to copyrights is censorship, you are being denied to spread or consume certain content. It's not different than defining that some content is protected with "national security" or however else you define it and then prevent the spread and consumption of it. Same thing, different excuse.
You can use placeholders to see it more clearly, i.e. "This content is X therefore in accordance to the law needs to be removed, failure to do so may lead to prosecution and penalties of Y"
You can replace X with anything, including "copyrighted material", "support for Hamas terrorism", "hate speech", "defamation of our glorious leader","communist propaganda", "capitalist propaganda", "self harm".
Is the removal of any content for any reason "censorship"? I don't think that fits conventional usage of the term, and broadening the scope of the word to that level removes much of its usefulness.
If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
> Is the removal of any content for any reason "censorship"? I don't think that fits conventional usage of the term
I think censorship is generally already considered to be any suppression of speech/communication/information. There are forms of censorship that many consider to be fine/justified, like taking down libel or removing inappropriate language in songs played on the radio, but it'd still conventionally be considered "censored".
The threat of 10 years in prison under the DMCA for providing information that lets people jailbreak/repair/reverse-engineer their own devices definitely fits the bill of censorship to me.
> If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
If you see some state/company secret that you weren't supposed to, and the government prevents you communicating about it, I'd say that's a form of censorship. I don't think it can be analogized to stealing an object in a meaningful way.
Yes it is censorship. A 3rd party decides what you can consume, the only difference between instances is that you may or may not agree with that.
I don't want to go into the copyright discussion. The only thing I will tell you is this and I won't follow up: Piracy is not theft, it's something else and removal of content to elevate the claimed harm is still censorship. Other censorship types all claim greater good too, the "good guys" in this digital world are not just the copyright lawyers.
I am not saying this from anti-copyright perspective, I'm not anti-copyright although I have issues with it and IMHO needs a reform.
Yes, and yes. Property is theft. Monopoly on objects which have virtually zero cost to be duplicated can't be justified by any moral ground, so it's basically only possible with corrupted mind enforcing this as social policy using psychological manipulation since garden, and every brutal means that can impose them in the obey or suffer dichotomy mindset.
You believing all property is theft is very avant-garde of you, but at the same time it is not a stance the vast majority of the world agrees with (including Germany), so it hardly seems relevant to a constructive conversation centered around the behavior of German ISPs.
Which of these definitions do you think supports your case?
The most relevant Merriam Webster definition, which is actually under "censor (verb)", I reproduce here:
> to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable
Piracy is not typically considered bad due to being "objectionable", it is considered bad because many people/societies consider it equivalent to theft. You can obviously stretch the definition of objectionable to mean that, but it is on you to demonstrate that is a reasonable stretch. Blocking out sex scenes from a movie and removing pirated materials are obviously different actions, and this definition clearly refers to the former.
If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states had voted last fall, none of the lawlessness that we’ve seen this year would have happened. The people telling you that voting is useless are enjoying the fruits of suckers believing them.
> If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states
The key part being "in a handful of states". There are many states in the country in which your vote is all but meaningless at the federal level. The Electoral College + relentless Gerrymandering that has been done over the past decades ensures that only a small fraction of eligible voters can cast meaningful votes. Makes it much easier to target and propagadandize those smaller groups. We saw it play out with Cambridge Analytica, but there hasn't been another "scandal" of that sort because it's just established practice now. Everyone has their hand in the pot doing the same thing, it's all above belt.
You should still vote, because you can enact change at the local + state levels, but the levers of federal power have been taken from the people.
You appear to be acknowledging that voting does matter, contrary to the previous sweeping claim.
Second, while some states may be unlikely to change their choice of president or senator, the local level matters quite a lot AND that’s where electoral reform will happen. If you don’t like the two party status quo, if you don’t like the electoral college, giving up on voting ensures defeat whereas supporting things like ranked-choice voting or the The National Popular Vote reform.
I kind of agree but think the upshot is exactly the reverse. First, swing states do matter as you acknowledge, which has exactly the opposite implication. Second, yes, by all means let's move beyond the Electoral college. There are organizations working to get a majority to sign the popular vote interstate compact. Check if your state is signed on and if not, I promise there's an org working on it that needs your help.
See? Same facts, but culminating in a call to action based on the premise that is affirmative of the value of democracy. If there was one person who mobilized this way for every ten who gave up in resignation it would be done already. But the battle against hedonic skepticism is hard.
These protocols or revisions already exist - DNSSEC at the site level and DoT/DoH at the user level prevent this kind of malicious tampering with responses by the ISP.
The issue is that they're not commonly used, and even if that changes, the ISPs can roll out harder-to-bypass censorship methods like SNI inspection or IP blocks.
And webmasters can, in turn, ramp up the adoption of QUIC, ECH, IPv6, or bury their frontend in some CDN that you can't feasibly "IP ban" without massive collateral damage.
You can't win the war against corporate censorship and malicious anti-freedom politicians through purely technical means. But you can sure make it much harder for them.
They do, and they deny they are doing it. The thing works like this: Telefonica owns Movistar, who has the rights to soccer matches. A few webpages offer pirated streams to those matches, behind Cloudflare. Telefonica call the judges and hand them the Cloudflare IP (shared by thousands of sites), who are obviously ignorant about how internet works, through a special "urgent" protocol. As soon as Telefonica has the judge OK, they stop serving Cloudflare, affecting thousands. Their support forums start to boil, but they deny any issue. As soon as the match ends, Cloudflare is back again. This only affects Telefonica and O2 clients.
Some business are really angry because they claim their peak hour of the week is during the matches (e.g. wife buying online while husband watch the match)
Imagine if the radios we all carry with us everywhere could be programmed to communicate with each other.
(I'm not sure why I replied here. I guess I'm saying that establishing some kind of mesh network protocol between all cellphones would be a great addition to those other protocols you mentioned.)
Cellular modems are typically locked down completely to shit. But I know of a few LTE chips that can be obtained with no pre-burned vendor boot keys, and also have the vendor modem sources and toolchains leaked.
SNI blocking will hopefully be harder now that Let's Encrypt is rolling out IP certificates, so ECH becomes viable for websites that don't share an IP address with known-good websites (like Cloudflare tunnels). IP blocks will be the only solution on the normal web.
These don’t prevent censorship necessarily, they will give you a way to detect it at best.
DNSSEC gives you the ability to verify the DNS response. It doesn’t protect against a straight up packet sniffer or ISP tampering, it just allows you to detect that it has happened.
DoT/DoH are better, they will guarantee you receive the response the resolver wanted you to. And this will prevent ISP-level blocks. But the government can just pressure public resolvers to enact the changes at the public resolver level (as they are now doing in certain European countries).
You can use your own recursive, and this will actually circumvent most censorship (but not hijacking).
Hijacking is actually quite rare. ISPs are usually implementing the blocks at their resolver (or the government is mandating that public resolvers do). To actually block things more predictably, SNI is already very prevalent and generally a better ROI (because you need to have a packet sniffer to do either).
DNSSEC itself won't help you alone, but the combination of DNSSEC + ODoH/DoT will. Without DNSSEC, your (O)DoH/DoT server can mess with the DNS results as much as your ISP could.
Of course you will need to configure your DNS server/client to do local validation for this, and at most it'll prevent you from falling for scams or other domain foolery.
Ultimately it all ends on the physical layer. Those who control the physical layer can always suppress communication if they choose so. The only protocol ISP can't mess with is having an army big enough (and somehow the commanders of that army has to be motivated not to mess with the protocol for their own purposes).
The protocols already exist. Deploy an I2P router for an effective darknet on the internet, or set up Yggdrasil for a next-generation decentralized & private internet alternative.
An even easier start, just set up unfiltered encrypted DNS on your devices. E.g. Njalla DNS or Mullvad DNS. Or get a good VPN such as Mullvad.
At the same time, keep voting for privacy. And send letters to your politicians!
It's great to have alternatives but in practice those don't really get adoption (until a catastrophe has already happened) and during regular times their usage tends to put a target on your back.
The workarounds on this page mostly suggest to use large public resolvers. Feature request (not sure if the author is on HN): it would be interesting to know which domains are blocked by 9.9.9.9, 1.1.1.1, and especially the new DNS4EU service.
I am not an expert but I read this website [1] and got impression that dns-over-tls is first iteration of encrypted dns and dnscrpyt protocol is second iteration of encrypted dns fixing its problems. Also dns-over-tls is not supported by package dnscrypt-proxy2 on openwrt and I have personal bias for not configuring dns-over-https on routers (in my opinion https is too complex protocol and have risk of getting hacked). Maybe I am alone with my opinions - I do not know. I wanted to use dns4eu and got really disappointed with not supporting dnscrypt. That's all.
By looking the list of negative sides of DNS over TLS (DoT) in there, this project seems to list artificial problems, which makes me want to avoid the whole project. Maybe there are real benefits on using this protocol, but they should not make the list of problems looking longer than it actually is.
The project especially lists the problems of TLS. TLS is one of the most understood, tested, and well-defined protocols that can be abstracted away in implementation level. Nothing also prevents forcing TLS 1.3 which removes most of the described other problems.
This especially sounds odd:
> Questionable practical benefits over DoH
But DoH brings the full TLS stack and also the HTTP stack as well? At the same time the project complains about increased attack surface in DoT, but DoH just extends it even more.
If I also look the DoH list, there is
> Requires TCP
But just few lines befeore, they say that DoH supports HTTP/3 which is UDP.
These stories and the stories about going after people who are torrenting in much more aggressive manner make my puzzle by Proton decision to relocate to Germany from Switzerland over some proposed law. I understand that it would make it harder to operate with protecting privacy but I would wonder why relocating to Germany, what would the Swiss government do that would be worse than the current situation in Germany?
I did not go though the details of the proposed Swiss law to be honest so it might be obvious why they are doing that but still why Germany instead of some other place (like Mullvad being in Sweden) ?
I am Swiss, but haven't looked into this in detail. My understanding is that the new law basically would require logging user data, with a six-month retention. While this isn't great, the EU is continually pressing for backdoors in encryption. That's far worse.
Hence, I think Proton's move is really about reducing costs, with the potential Swiss law as an excuse.
These domains aren't being seized, they are being blocked. In this case, as per TFA, they're just overriding the domain nameserver at the ISP default DNS server.
Even if they were actually seized, do you think if the police seize a rental car they'll be paying the rental fee until they give it back?
Seizing a domain probably costs way more in procedures than any renewal fees.
Also, blocking websites typically doesn't involve ICANN, the infringing website still owns the domain. They just order ISPs in the country to lie on some DNS queries, which is the reason why such blocks are so easy to work around.
Initially, this will be used exactly as intended and therefore seen as good. After about ~10 years it will include other "objectionable" material and a good case will be made for it so most people will not necessarily realize it.
What options are there? Do we have a reliable distributed DNS? I'm genuinely asking, because I've just realized that for the past 7 years I've been happily using my provider's DNS server and never thought of it.
But now, I'm seriously considering something better than that.
Ah telefonica… that’s Spanish, same company that every weekend blocks cloudfare in order to “avoid” football piracy. They don’t believe in laws, well they believe that laws are for the plebs not for them, the elites
Not just Telefónica. Yesterday was a Saturday so I couldn't access a crapton of websites from any of 3 different ISPs. It's getting really old at this point.
> Yesterday was a Saturday so I couldn't access a crapton of websites from any of 3 different ISPs
Wait, is that why yesterday internet was so janky? Encountered multiple websites that seemed offline when visited from my home (Spain) Vodafone connection, but all my remote servers could still access them. In my decade+ of living here, never heard of them doing a "Ah today it's Saturday, lets block Cloudflare" thing until this very moment. Have any resources (Spanish or English) where I can read more about this? Fucking ridiculous if this is true.
They also mention Movistar, O2, and Vodafone.
A systematic violation of the internet's integrity, carried out on the scale of an entire so-called "free" EU(!) country. It's a disaster.
You can say "the elites" in Telefonica case, because is heavily under the Spanish socialist party control.
Pedro Sanchez forced a public investment (€1134 billion) into that company using the SEPI so he can control Telefonica. Then he changed Telefonica president with a socialist pawn, inserted many socialist "elite" into the company, and as a cherry on top, he embedded Huawei inside Telefonica core systems.
Listen, kids, the higher you get into politics, the faster the textbooks (Marx, Smith, and antything in between) get tossed out of a window and drugs, prostitutes and hard power it's what matters.
Better if you don't know how actual politics work, because it that would be pure Realpolitiks. Imagine an 1984 and a Brave New World merded and psychos on top keeping the illusion because of raw power. You have that today.
The closest against to that would be the EFF, Richard Stallman, and hardcore groups and humanists working maybe for pride, but helping the rest of the society as the main social law (Golden Rule).
But we are not ready. We have a 'hardware' from Neolitics and a 'software' from the Space Era... no wonder the are wars and hardcore collisions between ideologies...
“Your internet provider can’t block or throttle websites. The open web stays open.”
Open Internet (Net Neutrality) Regulation (EU) 2015/2120
Official text on EUR-Lex
Just checked the list of blocked domains, and my very first try if I can open it, I got also a censorship website from the spanish government (I'm in spain, provider is DIGI) for fitgirl-repacks.site - other (mostly german) piracy sites from the list open fine.
Spain here too, Vodafone, and fitgirl-repacks.site also displays "ESTÁ USTED INTENTANDO ACCEDER A UN SITIO WEB ILEGAL" if I accept the (obviously) mismatched certificate they're using.
Surprisingly, thepiratebay.org is available for me though without issues. My previous ISPs here (Movistar, Orange, Jazztel) were all blocking thepiratebay.org
Seems to be pretty hit/miss what exact domains various ISPs block here. I would have imagined the police/courts serve like a centralized .txt file (simplified) the ISPs just fetch once a day or whatever, but seems to be way less organized than that, for better or worse.
You are right. Found out there is also DNS4EU with a bit more privacy-friendly orientation. How much they log, well, unless they get audited, I won't know.
So basically, we need a new way of contact DoH multiple DNS's for a probabilistic response for a site. Ideally, you could also verify geographically different ASNs, including opposing countries to get around legal idiocy.
Even better, do this resolution over Tor.
Doing that would bypass any state level stupidity, inflicted by an oligopoly, state actors, or similar.
The legal basis is explained here [0] . Funny thing is that in contrast to what the OP says the German net agency says that the CUII needs a court decision:
>A rights holder represented in the CUII can find copyright infringements and then file a lawsuit with the court for the implementation of a DNS block. If the court decides that a DNS block is lawful, this block is implemented by the Internet access providers organized in the CUII. The prerequisites for a blocking claim against the Internet access provider pursuant to § 8 DDG are met, - if a rights holder can prove his copyright, - his works are published on the Internet without his consent, - he has no other way of remedying the infringement, - if the blocking is reasonable and proportionate.
Time to break out the 20 Germany bad demographic maps that dovetail-overlay with East Germany and Afd. Or the fire set by Russian agents that destroyed 1,400 Vietnamese owned businesses in Poland. Were those suppressed in Germany?
I think the main problem is that Germany does not have a constitutional equivalent to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Instead, each federal state and the federal government have fragmented information access laws, often with broad exemptions for official secrecy.
In many cases, even investigative journalists cannot obtain details about governance processes and decisions made behind closed doors. The government often cites strict data protection rules and uses them as a shield against disclosure.
Another example: In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement. If someone feels they have been treated "unfairly", good luck to prove that in court when two officers present a completely different version of events, especially since body cameras are very rare in germany.
> I think the main problem is that Germany does not have a constitutional equivalent to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Instead, each federal state and the federal government have fragmented information access laws, often with broad exemptions for official secrecy.
> In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement
I think this is misleading. It's not especially prohibited. Generally, law enforcement enjoys the same rights as everyone else, that is having a right to privacy and the confidentiality of the spoken, non-public word. You can't film law enforcement folks preemptively, or without cause, if they have the reasonable expectation of confidentiality of the spoken word. If law enforcement is breaking the law, you are allowed to collect video evidence. In any case, you are not allowed to publish non-public video recordings or pictures of anyone, taken without explicit, or implicit consent. Public or non-public here means the implied confidentiality of communication, not necessarily where it happened. Eg. talking on a public street doesn't make every conversation public.
Mind you, in Germany, illegally obtained evidence isn't as easily dismissed as it is in the US. If you record the police without cause (illegally) and they happen to commit a crime, your recording isn't tainted evidence as far as I know, but rather you may (if indicted) face legal consequences yourself, independently. Again, publication is a completely different matter.
Legality of video recordings is pretty much irrelevant, regarding the legal power dynamics you described, as the police could just confiscate your phone and find some excuse for destroying the evidence. Independent oversight seems more important to address this.
On the other hand, I do think law enforcement should enjoy privacy, generally, as everyone else. I don't think, having a camera in your face with every interaction is helpful for anyone, all things considered, but would rather aid escalation and discourage leniency. Constant video surveillance just sucks, no matter who is doing the recording.
Honestly, wartime foreign media blocking is the only justified censorship type IMHO. Even then I would say that should be accessible with a delay. Why? Because media is is part of the tools in the war, up until the last day before the invasion Moscow officials on Twitter were mocking USA and other western leaders warning that Russia has troops build up and the invasion was imminent. The traditional Russian media was also writing articles about this. This was putting political pressure on the Western leaders, portraying them as warmongers reducing their credibility etc. Then suddenly one night Putin had 55min speech on why it was the West was the actual invaders and started the invasion. To this day, the Russian propaganda holds strong and awful lot of people are convinced that it is Russia who is facing invasion and is fighting bravely against the aggressors. Including the US administration since a few months.
On the other hand, complete permanent blocking also undermines populations assessment of the reality. As it turned out, the West wasn't also entirely truthful on the progress of the war and the effectiveness of the sanctions.
I don't know maybe we should have safeguards instead of censorship.
I'd go further and say that Germany is not part of the (general) internet. From the top of my head I can list 5-10 domains that are blocked. No site explaining, just "this site can't be reached". Reasons are piracy, pornography, politics. And the biggest problem is that it's being widely defended with many voices to increase that censorship.
I've never ran into a DNS blocked domain, so I am really curious which 10 domains from the top of your head are blocked on the DNS level, specifically in Germany?
The raid was because of allegedly antisemitic post, but they totally botched the warrant.
The mentioned antisemitism in the title but not in the reasons.
And it happened in Bavaria, not the biggest fans of the Green party, so it‘s a little bit strange that the state attorney went with a raid.
> In 1964, The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger, was initially rejected because of two scenes in which the actresses Linda Geiser and Thelma Oliver fully expose their breasts; and a sex scene between Oliver and Jaime Sánchez, which it described as "unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful." ... On a 6–3 vote, the MPAA granted the film an "exception" conditional on "reduction in the length of the scenes which the Production Code Administration found unapprovable." The exception to the code was granted as a "special and unique case", and was described by The New York Times at the time as "an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent."[63] The requested reductions of nudity were minimal, and the outcome was viewed in the media as a victory for the film's producers.[62] The Pawnbroker was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval. ...
For understandable reasons, censorship in particular of Holocaust and Nazi-related imagery is especially heavy-handed in Germany. Among other things, this has led to bans of several video games (note how much space is dedicated to Germany on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_by_...) that were relatively popular and uncontroversial in North America, particularly ones with an eye to historic simulation. The context of depicting the Nazis as unquestionably the bad guys who you as a player character must vanquish, does not matter to the censors.
FWIW I was also sceptical, but just tried it from my phone network and it seems indeed blocked. Wouldn't be the first case of different ISPs using different block-lists. c.f. bs.to
Not parent but I'm skeptical because normalizing blocking is a very real slippery slope. Last night I debugged an issue with one of my apps for 1h, it turned out one of the Cloudflare IPs my device got were legally blocked in Spain. Not even ISP DNS, but the IP. And this is because of some CF customer hosting a football (soccer) streaming site. This is the new normal, in a democratic country. What the post is talking about in Germany seems similar. And these are democratic countries with many constitutional freedoms. This is not a hypothetical, but happening today. ID verification is already implemented in the UK. Chat control is possibly next.
So let me flip the question: if a certain thing is illegal in a jurisdiction, but hosted outside, is it justified to block access to the hosting provider (notably, including Cloudflare and other giants)?
I would. Appetite for censorship should be measured against something I find unpalatable. When one starts down the road of making decisions for others - it is only a question of time before someone does the same for you with possibly a different perspective. The moment one finds themselves outside the groupthink on spaces vs tabs, I'd like that bar to be as far away as possible.
> The moment one finds themselves outside the groupthink
The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do). The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.
If there's nothing wrong with what is being said, then why should it matter who says it? Does propaganda somehow gain effectiveness because it comes "from the source"?
Shutting down a business = economic sanctions. Blocking domain of a web publication is part of shutting it down.
What do you prefer instead, to make domain registrars enforce sanctions instead of blocking on DNS level? That would quickly make so that no one with Russian passport is able to register a domain no matter how much we are against russia or putin
Because the people writing the laws within the EU are also acutely aware that phrasing this ban too broadly constrains freedom of speech. The way the ban is handed is walking the fine line between impinging freedom of speech and denying a enemy state from waging an information war.
Romania had to rerun an election due to Russian inference, this isn’t just a phantom the EU made up to censor opinions it doesn’t like.
> The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do).
It is not. People are allowed to do what they will, as long as those people are not the outlet itself. The propaganda outlet loses control over it and cannot push the media through, only hope that others pull it from them.
If you believe in any kind of system of morality, it's absolutely possible for one's own government to be in the moral wrong and the enemy government to be in the moral right. Censorship means the citizens may never learn that their country is the bad guy in that case.
Right, but as long as you wage genocide against non-Europeans then Europe will not only support you, but will go after the people protesting it. That's the morals of European leaders today.
Every person and institution have a limited number of flips to give
My GAF meter is pretty low for anti-secular groups that shot first. And their own neighbours who were "supposed" to be their allied seem to think the same
Apart from the fact that you seem to be equating a whole people with one group, you also seem to conveniently not realize that the government committing the genocide is a non-secular messianic one, with a deep seated belief of the superiority of their own religious group over any other, but particularly feel themselves superior to the people they occupy for decades, who of course despite them being occupied are always supposed to find compassion and understanding for their occupier first, otherwise the occupation cannot end, right?
There were and are plenty of reasonable groups one could work with, but the genocide is about grabbing land, asserting dominance and exacting revenge, while feeding a victimhood complex that is never able to acknowledge its own mistakes.
Russia is also not engaged in a direct war with Europe yet we still sanction them because they are by proxy, similar to Israel: Israel's actions in Gaza are creating waves of refugees that Europe has to take in, and then we have the potential terrorist attacks by those people as revenge for Europe's military aid to Israel who see Europe as partly to blame for destruction of their home country.
Israel definitely should be sanctioned till it stops its war crimes because doing nothing will directly affect us.
i would like to remind you that Germany was one of the biggest recipients of russian gas in Europe, and worked actively to keep it flowing despite the war, and didn't try to break away from their dependence for a very long time.
It's pure hypocrisy coupled with conformity - or rather virtue signalling. Send junk weapons to Ukraine to showcase that you do support the cause, meanwhile keep buying gas the same time go after their propaganda because that looks nice.
There is a difference I think between unpalatable content (that you disagree with, that you find incorrect, and so on) and content generated with the specific purpose of deceiving the reader.
I used to be a hardline freedom of information defender, but we must face the fact that humanity has become way too good at manufactoring opinions and even facts. We're exposed to this threat at all levels, from your local company invading your feed with hidden ads in legitimate tiktok content to nation states influencing your political worldview.
Considering yourself immune to this manipulation is as naive as thinking you don't need vaccines - depressingly, we've far beyond the point where individual protection is enough.
>I would. Appetite for censorship should be measured against something I find unpalatable.
In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished.
Now imagine you have a Ruzzian TV station publishing hard core porn for children to see, how to you punsish them without paid trolls claiming censorship ? Because this si what happens, in Romania Romanian TV station need to respect the Romanian laws , liek for example pay fines and retract any falsehoods and mistakes, but Ruzzians can publish fake documents and videos and if we want them to respect the laws of our countries we it is censorship... blocking faked documents is bad, blocking boobs is good in the land of the free
> In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished
rt hasn't done this and there are concrete laws against doing this, if rt violated them, they would/should fined/suspended, it's really that simple, do you have any real examples of illegal things they've carried out?
and if you're implying that extrajudicial measures are the only effective method to deal w/ situations like these, then there's an issue w/ the laws
just because censorship is carried out against a cause you don't like, doesn't make it justified, since it's very likely to be used in less benevolent ways in the future
It is similar to the problem of pornography online.
If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to watch your kids and install a porn filter on their computer / tv / phones. It is pointless to have websites to verify that you are old enough, as there always be websites from abroad who will not respect the law, and it forces you to leak your identity (who becomes tied to your IP address).
If you are not happy with propaganda, it is your role and the role of schools to educate people around about how to consume information and look with a critical view.
Propaganda affects everyone, not just kids. It even affects people with university studies but who have given up thinking for themselves. The problem is that they authorities are banning websites, while social media is riddled with propaganda. They claim to do something which clearly doesn't work.
The Internet used to be cool in the '90 when it wasn't regulated and Meta, Google and Tiktok didn't exist. Now it's all ads, propaganda and hate speech.
Just think about this (which is not 100% correct, but for the sake of discussion): it's probably not meta, google and tiktok. It's the internet peoples who are the source of all that. It's peoples who say hate, who push for ideas they believe in, and they also (surprise!) publish ads! (While google et cetera are just a medium, with lots of moderation, yep.).
I don’t think your porn comparison works because normally what happens is governments set rules about what content can be shown at what times. In the UK, we call it the “watershed”.
Setting limits on what content can be shown at what times isn’t censorship because you’re not actually censoring content. What you’re doing is setting rules about scheduling content.
What you actually need is to have a feature on iPhone / Android (and on the home Wi-Fi) to block porn and that parents can enter a pin-code to unlock that, if you consider this is non-acceptable in your family.
Some broadcasters do already have this feature. For example if you watch adult content (doesn’t have to be nudity, could be violent shows or other content that isnt considered appropriate for children) on SkyTV (UK satellite) then then you get promoted for a pin if its before 9pm.
The thing I referred to in my previous comment is more of a historical thing before smart TVs and similar tech. Current RF technology is still just an evolution of the same signals sent 70+ years ago. So they’d moderate content via scheduling. “Terrestrial TV” still works that way today.
Clear case of "motive justifies the means". I think in a free democracy, no one should block any propaganda, as it the responsibility of the individual to asses what to read and what not. In a democracy, it is more dangerous to censor and justify the means with motive - this opens the door to unjust censorship.
The best counter-argument I can provide to your wonderful ideal is that people are stupid, and they are vulnerable to being manipulated into believing dangerous peace-disrupting falsehoods by propaganda.
Spinning your thoughts further, you assume that stupidity is not some kind of freedom that you get to enjoy in a democracy. The opposite is true, people are free to be stupid, and if the majority is stupid, the smart people have to give in to the fact that stupid people make the rules (by voting).
The whole idea of supressing stupidity in a democracy leads to some sort of elitist society.
>The whole idea of supressing stupidity in a democracy leads to some sort of elitist society.
there's nothing wrong with this. Stable democracies tend to be republican and elitist. One of the reasons why the US has been, until recently, an exceptionally stable country was because decision making was largely insulated from the whims of the public. Democracy properly understood is best used as a tool for legitimacy and as a check against the worst abuses of power, not actually as a tool for decision making.
Having the inmates run the asylum is generally a bad idea, we've known this since Plato.
What if at the end of the day, that propaganda does work and leaving it unopposed is as much a danger to democracy as censorship? It seems like a scenario where you have to pick your poison now, the last 100 years have shown populations can be manipulated.
Democracy is sneaky refined domination, subtle enough that masses do not see through it, but it is elites controlling the masses.
At the end, this political system is about supporting current power who settled by force (and to whom you have to pay a tax to not be sent into physical jail, and all your belongings taken).
Remember that at the beginning, these nice people are actually people who killed to be in place, and collected a lot of power and money, and that are now defending their position.
Kingdoms, then Dictatorship were too unstable, and this gave birth to Democracy, still with the same elites.
In some way, it is a softer continuation of conquest-coercion dressed as consent.
The newest generations use propaganda to settle; the approach changes, but the goal is ultimately the same.
Except, in the case of RT, it was not justified in an abstract way at all. Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.
To put it another way, if a judge can imprison a murderer for life as justified by the motive of reducing murders, what's stopping them from imprisoning everyone with no justification at all? Well, in practice the evidence required is quite a hurdle to this.
If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused, then you're arguing against the concept of punitive action outright.
It used to be common sense among non-authoritarians, that propaganda just becomes more potent from suppression.
Plenty of people have never seen moon hoax theorists' propaganda. They imagine if they see it, they'll quickly see through it for its absurdity. But they're often wrong. Moon hoax theorist's propaganda is actually much better than you think. They can point out lots of "inconsistencies", which do have an explanation, but aren't immediately obvious at all. You see they have experience meeting people like you, but you don't have experience meeting people like them.
I used moon hoaxers as an example because their sophisticated propaganda actually have been exposed and explained a few times, although it still isn't common knowledge why e.g. it seems the exact same rock is right behind an astronaut in two different photos. But that isn't nearly as true for suppressed ideologies. You haven't heard their arguments.
Your example of moon landing theories isn't an apt comparison because you're picking a fringe group. RT already had millions of international followers on Facebook, YouTube, etc., often more than high quality journalism outlets. I've been online long enough to see RT showing up uninvited in my feeds before.
Consider the cost of the sites I listed. Literally, how do you pay these companies? With the monetization of your attention, first and foremost. Good journalism costs money to produce, leaving good journalists unable to be the highest bidder.
Point is, you should be glad the attempt at censoring RT fails pretty bad.
If it had been more effective, more people would become very impressed the first time they came across a new to them, consistent (more or less!) narrative universe in which the bad guys are the good guys. Not only that, but their narrative incorporates a bunch of entirely true, verifiable damning truths about "our" side.
I don't have a side in terms of a political entity or official, I'm defending evidence-based action. I genuinely think my life is better because I don't have to defend anyone uncritically, but you're welcome to try and change my mind I guess lol
> Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.... If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused
Can you give a concrete example? (Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered, in years of people denigrating RT on the Internet.)
Sure, they reported that Jewish individuals had to flee Ukraine due to a Nazi takeover and a supposed ongoing genocide. There's no evidence of the fleeing or the genocide happening. This was one of the false narratives cited in the EU court's ruling.
> Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered
I err on the side of brevity, not seeing a claim that RT's removal was unjust in the comment I was responding to, I felt no need to justify it myself.
It's true, Russia could be said to engage in full-blown hybrid warfare according to some definitions. I don't want to downplay what they do at all.
But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.
> But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.
Just because two things superficially share some traits doesn't mean they are equivalent, at all. "Full-blown warfare against their own populations" is a bit dramatic, don't you think? As a German, I can tell you, while the government doesn't much act to my benefit, I am not exactly at war with them either. Intelligence, military and police don't have the competence or power, either. Most importantly, like in many proper democracies, there is a plurality of opinions and oversight in parliament, which prevents this sort of thing at scale. "Full-blown warfare" would imply a grand conspiracy, that's simply not factual.
Apart from the UK, Hungary and Poland, I think that's true for most western countries. The US is a bit exceptional, of course, since... well, I don't know what the fuck they are smoking there.
If you think the masses are too susceptible to unapproved propaganda to the extent we have to censor it, it’s not clear to me that you can consistently believe democracy should be your form of government, as opposed to some sort of rule by experts/the rich/the educated/aristocrats/something else. It’s effectively saying the masses get a choice unless it’s the wrong choice.
I believe in democracy. If people want to listen to ridiculous and false Russian propaganda or support Russia against Ukraine they should be able to without hindrance, even if their politicians or the better informed don’t like it. It’s their job to persuade their fellows. They shouldn’t get to declare their beliefs are right and beyond democratic contestation.
Sometimes democracies make really bad decisions. Alciabiades conned the Athenians into the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. That’s the tradeoff you get for having a democracy. Declaring some subjects out of bounds is taking away democracy and installing something else instead, with those tradeoffs, that we as a society decided we weren’t going to make, without consensus.
Some people mainly come to political positions for emotional reasons rather than substantive ones. These people are generally easy to reach for populists and propagandists.
Many of the real problems in society, unfortunately, have no easy solutions and require very substantive evaluation, weighing expert opinions, etc. In the current environment it has become very hard to get a lot of people to even consider these or, if they want, elect someone to do it in their stead.
TLDR: populism + propaganda causes significant dysfunction in democracies, especially ones that aren’t winner-takes-all.
> Some people mainly come to political positions for emotional reasons rather than substantive ones
As opposed to your positions. The masses, well, they think wrong, but you, you thought long and hard about everything and you came to the right conclusions.
What's next? Give the right to vote only to the "right" people?
After all, if you can't trust the judgment of the masses because their views are based mainly on emotional reasons then surely you don't think they should have a say in how their country should be run?
I realize very well the problems of following this line of thought. But clearly populism combined with propaganda isn’t working out either in a number of countries. Should we just stop thinking about causes and what could be done about it, because it’s uncomfortable to think about it?
You are presenting an argument and I am pointing out the flaws in it.
I am also presenting the logical conclusion of your argument that maybe you were not comfortable making in your original comment, that is that a certain part of the population is not capable of thinking rationally and therefore, someone else must decide what they should be able to see, hear and read because otherwise they may make the "wrong" choices.
That, in turn implies that their votes could be also swayed by emotional reasons, so if you think that these people are not capable of making up their own mind about the issues that we face today, then surely, you are not fine with having them express their opinion in the voting booth.
> But clearly populism combined with propaganda isn’t working out either in a number of countries.
So your solution to populism is to refrain the population from accessing views that you find problematic?
> I realize very well the problems of following this line of thought
I don't think you do because if you did then you would know that having the state decide what citizens should have the right to see or hear is exactly the same kind of rhetoric that authoritarian regimes use today.
> Should we just stop thinking about causes and what could be done about it, because it’s uncomfortable to think about it?
I don't think anyone is feeling uncomfortable looking at the many issues that the western democracies are facing today.
I am uncomfortable however when someone thinks that the solution to these problems is to go down the path of censorship because sooner or later someone will use the same excuse to start censoring political opponents/ so-called undesirable views in the name of saving democracies or protecting the children or fighting terrorism as it has been seen time and time again.
The solution to the views that you find problematic such as the ones expressed on RT is not found in the reduction of free speech, it is done through education and demonstration of the facts.
So, if democracy means you have to trust people to make up their mind and decide for themselves, unconditionally, then why is there hardly any system with even elements of direct democracy (in contrast to the parliamentary/representative approach)?
None of these problems are new. The problems have been well-understood since the founding of all Western democracies and we accepted that trade off, as we decided the alternative systems were all worse. You can find this very debate in newspapers and CC notes (in America)at the time, about “false rumors” stirred up by “designing men.”
These are all the exact same arguments made by regimes like the CCP as to why their authoritarian methods are necessary. It’s all for the public order and the public good as unfortunately, many people are stirred up even against their own interest by meddlers, demagogues, and foreign interests. Fortunately, the CCP knows better, as the Party makes sure that the experts are making decisions based on all the data.
I would prefer to live in a democracy, and it astounds me to see people in the West repeating word for word what Russians and Chinese regime apologists say about their governments, all while explaining it’s all necessary to protect democracy.
> Sorry, I'm more confortable with RT being blocked than having another Adolf Hitler screaming their own propaganda.
Is that really a good example? Weimar Germany regularly suppressed and censored Nazi newspapers and publications, shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers, and even at one point suppressed party gatherings.[1] Obviously, it did not work, and the Nazis used the same laws and precedent to suppress their enemies when they took power, and were able to campaign with statements like "in all of Germany, why are WE silenced?"
You can take two things away from this:
1. Weimar should have suppressed the Nazis EVEN HARDER. Weimar needed an even more stringent censorship regime, shutting down any publication and arresting the editors at the slightest whiff of wrongthink. They should have deployed informers to identify and arrest dissidents before they broke out into the public arena.
OR
2. Weimar Germany was a deeply unpopular and dysfunctional regime that had already failed. Governments should do better to represent the interests of their people so that things never get to that point. The Nazis would never have obtained any power if Germany had been doing well and people felt represented by their government, no matter what kind of crazy propaganda they put out; people don't choose extremism because of propaganda, they become propagandized when they are deeply disaffected. Censorship only further delegitimized the regime and increased the popularity of the Nazis, as it showed they were a threat to the people in power that were perceived to be mismanaging the country.
You are comfortable with the blocking until the politicians start blocking something you care about.
When that happens, you won't be happy anymore and you will go on Twitter complaining that your government is turning fascist in a hurry and ask how nobody did anything to stop this.
But you probably think that it's never going to happen because you are one of the good people, not the scum of the earth that dares watching Tiktok.
Don't worry, nobody would stop it anyway, at least nobody on Twitter and Tiktok. The Kremlin is paying the nazis to scream, shout and create diversions. Then they could justify other de-nazifying invasions. The only ones rallying now are the nazis, screaming and shouting, oh no, cancelled elections.
This is the same argument as for encryption. You can't have encryption only for the good guys and not for the criminals. You either have encryption that protects everyone including criminals or you have no encryption.
In this case, you can't have free speech while advocating for censorship against what you consider to be propaganda.
Either everyone has the right to express themselves, including pro war lunatics or you right to free speech will eventually go extinct because then it's only a matter of time before someone else will use the same argument to start censoring a topic or an idea that you care about and they will do it the with the same zeal as you when you agreed to censor RT.
Yet despite this fact that has been proven time and time again, here we are in 2025 with people like you who applaud censorship.
It's like handing knives out on a playground. rt.com is handing out propaganda which is meant to influence those who are already distrustful of mainstream institutions.
Propaganda usually isn't banned, except in specific cases (defamation, hate speech, etc...). But AFAIK, RT is not special in that regard, it is just the kind of content one would expect from a website openly affiliated with Russian authorities.
There is abundant factual evidence that the US worked to undermine democracy in Ukraine in 2014 when Ukraine elected a candidate favourable to Moscow. It's not propaganda to draw attention to that.
As a Ukrainian, this statement of yours is complete and utter bullshit.
Where did you heard it?
It is not only factually incorrect, every point is just completely wrong: no favorable candidate to Moscow was elected in 2014, US did not worked to undermine democracy and there is absolutely zero evidence of both of these things happened.
This is what RT and other propaganda networks is dangerous, it creates a fake reality which people believe in. Then you act on this knowledge as if it is real.
Not OP, but there is strong censorship. The previous government sent a police brigade to a random dud that said something like “he is a clown” or similar (don’t remember the details). In Germany you have to be extremely careful with what you say, and how you say it, because you can be in jail faster than you think.
There are people who see that as positive, because are used to be extremely careful and conscious of their words. But is a very thin line, where one word can obliterate your life as you know it.
Here one: translation you can do at leisure. Also there is a sister comment with a similar case. I have a family memver that was also persecuted for hanging a flag saying “the park is for the children “ as they wanted to construct in a park.
"Demnach soll er im Frühjahr 2024 auf X eine Bilddatei mit Bezug zur Nazi-Zeit hochgeladen haben, die möglicherweise den Straftatbestand der Volksverhetzung erfüllen könnte."
The police was sent when he wrote “schwachkopf”. Not before. The association with nazi came much later, and had a pretty good explanation. If you look the coments that guy wrote was CRISTAL CLEAR he was not nazi, and much less antisemitic. Was a clear case of using a law for what it was not intended.
In 2021, Andreas Grote, the minister of interior of the Germany city-state Hamburg was called a dick in a tweet. (Andy, you are such a dick). This led to a police search of the home of the Twitter account owner [1].
This sparked a discussion about how to handle hate spech, as for regular people being called a dick does not result in a 06:00 am. police raid with six officers.
In the aftermath, a mural in a left wing culture center has been painted over multiple times with the tweet and a call for his resignation [1].
They do educate people to do that already. But the power of narrative is much stronger than the motivation to do the actual work of checking your sources.
It’s very easy to convince anyone to support your cause. Just tell them they are the real victims, that they have been deprived of their rightful privilege, and that it is someone else’s fault. Give them undue credit, take away their inconvenient responsibilities. I promise you, they will have zero motivation to uncover your lies.
We have a collective responsibility to protect the truth - the actual, messy, complicated, real-life truth.
Exactly. That isn't going to help the argument whatsoever. Blocking stuff without legal basis is an entirely different ballpark from legally mandated blocks after due process and the option for legal challenges.
The Russian propaganda spends a lot of resources on reinforcing high-minded ideals that provide a scaffolding for the intellectual types to climb on. The suckers and idiots fall for the more odious stuff.
I must ask sincerely: do you know of concrete instances where RT has been shown to claim things that are objectively untrue, that they reasonably ought to have known were untrue? Or is this just about them using the same techniques (selective reporting / emphasis on stories salient to particular worldviews, editorialization etc.) that everyone else uses?
For that matter, in most cases where RT has been linked to me, I couldn't see any clear way that the story advanced Russian interests, except perhaps by trying to paint the USA as full of internal social and cultural conflicts. But, frankly, American media does a pretty good job of that, too. (And many of those media outlets have also grossly misrepresented many events relevant to those conflicts — including ones where I know very well that they were misrepresented because I witnessed them first-hand. For example, I watched the Rittenhouse trial live-streamed, and then read media coverage describing something barely recognizable as what I just saw.)
(Besides, it's not like they're trying to hide that "rt" stands for Russia Today.)
Who cares. Just make it go away, there's too much noise already. I for one don't care about the arguments of some "news outlet" paid for by the ones who attacked Ukraine. The Global Times isn't banned because the CCP is outlining issues using restraint.
Can't take the "propaganda" and "misinformation" excuses seriously when the German establishment media has been blatantly lying to their teeth about an ongoing genocide, and smearing anyone who stood for an obvious moral cause with 0 repercussion. They make the Israeli far-right newspapers blush.
I feel like someone junior tried to hide their oopsies and did this in an unprofessional manner like all juniors are bound to do at some point (like youtube killing IE6).
Oh, you can be sure any new protocol approved by the IETF today is only going to reflect the needs and use cases of large corporations (see HTTP/3). We gotta work with what we have.
In Germany the citizens must change their DNS to block the German government control of their lives. Too many bad laws to keep giving them your consent to be governed.
> In Germany the citizens must change their DNS to block the German government control of their lives.
It's not the government directly, but what is called in German "Flucht ins Privatrecht" [escape into private law], meaning that the government "outsources" such activities to private organizations that are only very indirectly charged by the government (implying that you cannot use public law to sue the government, but you have to sue the respective organization indirectly. Also, since the relationship between the government and the respective organization is very indirect, the politicians can claim that they are not responsible for the organization's wrongdoings - something that is often not easy to disproof).
The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
Europe and Germany in particular took from the 30s-40s the lesson where freedom of expression is a risk in democracies because a demagogue can easily sway opinions.
For that reason they are in a better position to protect themselves against the 21st century threat to democracy of foreign influences networks
Yet even if you were never manipulated by false information or narratives in your life, if you live in the US you live in a country where pizzagate happened, the capital riots, the george floyd protests which also became very violent at times and other events where the russian IRA had a hand
"We need more government action and control to protect you from le bad people" does not in fact strike me as the opposite of what happened in Nazi Germany.
You can prevent organizations whose aim is to destroy democracy by exercising some restrictions on democracy without completely dismantling free speech and democracy.
just as for example you may jail someone and completely restrict their freedom in order to protect others, without completely dismantling democracy
Guy goes to the psychiatrist, he keeps clapping his hands. Explains that this is to keep away the elephants. Doctor goes "But there aren't any elephants around?" Guy replies "See? It's working!"
(I'm sure there's a more sophisticated way to refer to this fallacy, but my point stands.)
Not only most of europe was overtaken by fascism in the thirties, currently you have democracies that were taken over by authoritarians such as Russia, Turkey and Venezuela.
So it appears to me there are still elephants around
Yes, if by stronger governments you mean stronger democratic institutions that could have fought populism, that would have helped.
Democratic countries that are corrupt, weak and have poor cultural defense mechanisms against populism fail. In Germany such a mechanism is the one discussed in this thread, in the US it's a strong , almost religious belief in the constitution
The progress of censorship in every single Western country is an admission that "democracy" is a fallacy born from an exceptional small period of time of civil peace, economic growth and wealth. Countries can only follow a stable political path - good or bad, this is not the point - if they have an authoritarian regime.
Communism did not work because it was not communist enough, now democracy is not working because it's not democratic enough. Democracy is the golden calf of westerners. I truly believe that voting rights are hurting more a society than drugs and alcohol.
A crucial component of democracy is free and accurate media. Every single functioning democracy in the world has institutions that can apply some amount of sanctions against newspapers and other media that do no live up to the expectation of accuracy.
They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age, but that doesn’t mean it’s not reasonable or important. Blocking propaganda posing as “news” is a stopgap measure, but we can’t do nothing if we want democracy to work.
Democracy immediately stops existing when elites start to prevent people of "wrongthink".
Democracy is just another authoritarian system with a big downside: nobody is accountable of failures. There is no king, no chief to dethrone. Another friend of the temporary suzerain will be placed in power for a couple of years.
> A crucial component of democracy is free and accurate media.
What does "accurate media" mean?
The fact is, there strictly isn't and strictly never was any such thing.
In fact, it is absolutely impossible to attain something like this.
The moment something gets transcribed, it ceases to be objective and therefore, there never isnt any such thing as "accurate" news.
Any student of history learns this in their first semester.
> They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age
LOL, it was far, far worse before the information age.
True, there was far fewer "official" versions of what actually goes on in the world, but it doesn't mean they were in any way accurate or any less manipulative.
All it takes to check that is to hop from one so-called "free country" to another an compare two mainstream newspapers describing the same event.
The only way you can get a bit close to the actual truth of what's happening is by reading all the opinions, especially the diametrically opposed ones and try to form your own.
You can read entire twitter threads today completely composed in Russia, where the trolls write both sides
That has never happened with newspapers. Today's many people entire window to reality is through the internet and like it or not, people believe what's popular or if not, can believe an opinion is popular if it's widespread online.
It's very easy to create racial tensions for example that way, as was done by the russians
When exactly was there “free and accurate” media? Did you mistake the restrictions on some 20th century broadcast media that originated as a consequence of government licensing as some sort of centuries-old universal truth prior to social media? If anything newspapers in particular used to be much more irresponsible and scandalous, certainly as bad as anything on Twitter. And yes, there was plenty of foreign influence operations as well.
> In Germany, we have the Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) - literally 'Copyright Clearinghouse for the Internet', a private organization that decides what websites to block, corporate interests rewriting our free internet. No judges, no transparency, just a bunch of ISPs and major copyright holders deciding what your eyes can see.
I'm confused because CUII at:
https://cuii.info/en/about-us/
says (translated):
> The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
CUII is saying that they enforce court orders. I guess that language doesn't preclude them from also blocking other sites.
The blogpost is from February, since then, the CUII switched from arbitrarily decide on blocks through an internal group "until the court order arrives" to strictly include the domains from court orders.
So yes, they USED to just block whenever they wanted, based on "previous similar cases" but without a court order (or a pending one). They then got a lot of flak from the regulatory bodies and switched to actually only include court ordered blocks.
the blog post was written before the page was changed
https://web.archive.org/web/20250130115412/https://cuii.info... said
> The Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet (CUII) is an independent body in Germany. It was founded by German internet access providers and copyright holders to objectively examine whether the blocking of access to a given structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany is lawful. When copyright holders submit an application, a review board examines whether the relevant requirements are met. If they are, the review board then recommends a DNS-block of the structurally copyright-infringing website in question. Every recommendation of the review committee must be unanimous and only apply to clear cases of copyright infringement. The recommendation is then forwarded to the German Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railways (Bundesnetzagentur - BNetzA). If the examination by the BNetzA does not reveal any concerns about the DNS-block according to the provisions of the EU Net Neutrality Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2015/2120), the CUII then informs the internet access providers and the applicants accordingly. In such cases, the internet access providers participating in the CUII then block the corresponding domains of the structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany.
related post by the same author, which mentions the current version of the website: https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up
> The CUII now only coordinates blocks between ISPs after a court order. That's it. No more secret votes. No more corporate censorship. The new version of their website says: "The CUII coordinates the conduct of judicial blocking proceedings and the implementation of judicial blocking orders."
Is it usually this easy for corporations to get you to believe they are the good guys?
> Is it usually this easy for corporations to get you to believe they are the good guys?
I don't get your point.
What is written on the website of some company/organization/... when writing about itself, is what the respective company/organization/... wants you to believe about it. It should be trivial for you to recognize that what this company/organization/... wants you to believe about it can be very different from what you desire to find as truth about it.
It's like if I wrote: "aleph_minus_one is the greatest human that ever lived on earth." Do you now seriously believe that just because I wrote this about myself, it must be the truth?! :-)
I do not know, I think you are great. Maybe not the greatest, but great nonetheless.
(Disclaimer: I have no idea who you are, but you are great nonetheless!)
i think you are pretty good yourself joohnisgood
Hey, says so in my name! :D You are great too, even if your name does not say so!
Yes. They vote with their (lobby) money almost every day, unless you, who votes with a pencil, every four years.
A bit like "There used to be a lot of corruption is politics. There still is, but there also used to be."
The title is misleading. They didn’t block the author’s site’s DNS. They blocked their own site’s DNS to figure out how the author’s site determines their DNS blacklist. Then they changed strategy.
Note that the CUII blocking process is now based on court orders instead of arbitrary corporate decisions: https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up
> Sadly, there's a small catch: the old blocks stay.
Not true. The article you linked states that the current nefarious block list still exists, it just isn't growing any more.
How can they tell the difference between the CUII giving up and the CUII just saying that they have given up once they successfully found a way to conceal the blocks from the people checking?
There's no need to tell the difference between those, because the CUII has neither given up nor have they said that they have given up. They'll continue to block the kinds of websites they've been blocking and add new ones to the list, and they'll do so under court order, because the kinds of websites they've been blocking are the ones they're legally required to block. They've been accused of overblocking, but only in the weak sense of uselessly blocking domains that had already been taken down by other means. That will continue to happen with the courts in the loop, because there might be a takedown between the submission of evidence and the court order coming into effect.
Traditionally in the west, censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business.
Fast forward to today, Americans are pushing you for self censorship through force and denial(if you don’t speak in line with the admin, you will have hard time in your US public sector job or if you want to travel to US) and Europeans find all kind of other ways.
Tough new world order. I used to be advocating for resolution through legal/political means, but now I'm inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control. Nobody wants loose ends. Everyone is terrified of some group of people will do something to them, freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only. The guy who says want to make humans interplanetary species is posing with people detained for traveling on the planet without permission. Just forget about it.
So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.
> I used to be advocating for resolution through legal means, but now I inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control.
I came to a similar conclusion, what happened in the 90s and early 2000s is since the govs had restricted freedom in the physical/real world a lot of young people took refuge in the Internet.
It became harder for an individual to build his own house or start a business, but you could make a website pretty much free from regulations and impediments.
But governments and a lot of interested parties slowly invested the Internet and now we are complaining it sucks. The common Internet and web suck anyway now because it is full of bots, AI generated content, hard to search and you need to prove you are a human every 5 minutes.
We need to create new networks and places just because it is fun and it will take some time for the govs to follow us there: freenet, yggdrasil, alfis, gemini, reticulum, B.A.T.M.A.N, etc.
I'll have to check out gemini again sometime. I tried it out a couple of years ago and really liked how it had that wild west feel of the old-web.
I’m in the U.S. and am not aligned with what’s happening to freedom.
Taking a step back, I support the ideals (the good ones at least) of what I’d perceived that our country was founded on. I also support the individual people in our police and military, but not the fascist orders that they’re having to fulfill. I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general, I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
This is a predicament, because it’s like you’re driving the bus and a fascist jumps into your lap with a gun to your head and takes the wheel, while he has others put guns to the head of your family and others on the bus. No one asked for this, and I still feel like there are many that believe that there is nothing we can do and that it will take care of itself. But the gerrymandering law that just passed in Texas, on top of everything else that was already in place, is another warning that this won’t go away on its own.
I get what you’re saying about sending people to space, but I think that being able to get off our big rock if we can do so without destroying other life and other places in the universe is worth time and effort. Even natives that lived with the land and life that existed had to move sometimes, life and all that exists physically that has space is to some degree nomadic.
I doubt a lot of the individuals doing these actions, like police or ICE, don’t believe in this. They signed up for these jobs, and votes last year show many of them heartily endorse and believe in these policies.
The national guard, though, probably didn’t sign up to be the backdrop for political ads and a lot of FBI, DEA, etc. agents signed up to work on major crimes rather than busting someone’s landscaper.
Folks doing those duties and jobs should know that these organizations are parts of the executive role and remit of the president. They signed up to do whatever the president orders them to do. Officers have a somewhat different oath, but the chain of command is still abundantly clear to all involved.
>"I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general"
What delectable naivete.
> I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
Check out "Ordinary Men" by Christopher R. Browning.
Cops don't become psychopaths rather: Psychopaths become cops.
> I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general
Ha.
> So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.
It's tough to imagine what this might look like. I suspect it's too late.
Device attestation is becoming more prevalent, and required for increasingly more functionality. Passkeys are breathing down our necks.
Alternate protocols can only exist if the corporate and governmental powers look the other way. We have Signal and VPNs and BitTorrent and tor, but for how long?
And moreover, does it even matter what protocols we want to use, if most of us use devices that are fully controlled by the tech giants who want to do the censorship?
I don't know if there are particular good ground-level solutions to infrastructure (mesh networks can have their application but are difficult to drive critical mass adoption and every square inch of mesh network has "last mile" problems).
Ideally you would have good government involvement to enforce traffic neutrality, but that's out the door. I'm sure this has been talked to death but ground level P2P infrastructure is what I would be rooting for.
Interesting point. There’s wide acceptance of commercial censorship, but censorship for the common good (rightfully) feels like a slippery slope. But are they actually so different? Couldn’t the latter be done in a way just as purposeful? Or does it always lead to loss of freedom disproportional to its goals?
I don't think that there's difference, just implementation details differ. Youtube was blocked in Turkey for many years because someone from Germany uploaded defamatory videos about Ataturk(illegal in TR) and it was considered protected speech and Germany & Google refused deleting those. The situation was resolved when someone copyrighted Ataturk in Germany and made Youtube remove these videos.
Besides copyright, especially among Americans, I find that its completely O.K. to censor content it is bad for business. A major one is censorship in order to be advertisement friendly but anything flies, even the guy owns the thing and can do whatever he pleases is good enough for many(slightly controversial).
This is a myth: in Germany, as in many other countries, copyright covers only specific expression; you cannot copyright either the name of a historical person or a topic of discourse. The videos were briefly taken down as an automatic response to a complaint, but it seems the complaint was not upheld and the videos were restored.
At the time, Germany had a law censoring insulting comments about foreign heads of state, but that only applied to living ones (and maybe only those in office at the time?) That law was repealed in 2018.
The videos remained blocked in Turkey, but on account of a specific law banning criticism of Ataturk, not copyright.
Okay, how this changes the core argument? The videos were not taken down briefly because they did not comply with the Turkish law that protects Ataturk from defamation but for the claim that they violated someones commercial interests.
The video wasn't taken down over commercial interests. They were taken down because some old law prohibited insults at representatives of other nations, with whom Germany has diplomatic relationships.
https://archive.is/wWvwM
As the claim you made about copyright being used to take down a video was completely false, how did it contribute to anything?
We do accept „censorship“ if it follows due process based on clear and well-intended laws. Think taking down piracy sites, child porn, slander.
But CUII is formed by a private oligopoly, with anonymous judges, implementing vague rules, trying to keep secret even what they block. All while limiting what the vast majority of Germans (who don’t know what DNS is) can access on the internet. IMO that’s the issue.
What about all the propaganda sites you like?
Would you ban all propaganda? Russian propaganda? Propaganda from countries engaged in illegal wars? How many social media or news sites survive? Heck, how many sites that allow comments and user interaction survive?
Yours is the "think of the children" argument, makes you feel warm and fuzzy when it aligns with your interests but you won't have a leg to stand on by the time it's used against you. Banning is just sweeping some of the trash under the carpet. The ones wielding the ban hammer don't care that most of the trash is still out in the open (social media?), they just need to open the door to arbitrary banning. The ones applauding the ban hammer are lacking the same critical thing that would otherwise handle propaganda and misinformation very well: education.
If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack on a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
Meanwhile all the RT type crap is flooding social media under thousands of names. But that's fine as long as enough rubes are tricked into thinking banning one site did anything to solve the propaganda issue.
It’s just not as black-and-white as you say. Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom in my country and the EU on a daily basis. Should we invest in education (that is generally already reasonably good, IIUC)? Should we leave it to commercial journalism, even the best of which are moving to clickbait headlines? Should we do nothing?
> "Propaganda is doing a lot of harm to democracy and freedom"
What's "freedom" mean if not the right to read any publication you want, including (especially!*) media from hostile foreign countries? It's cynical to attack core civil liberties and say that you are doing so in defense of liberty.
*This is the most obvious thing in the world, IMHO, if you look at the general category, and ask yourself what you think about it when the actors are switched around. If China bans its citizens from reading the New York Times (it does), is that a human rights violation—or is it a simple exercise of sovereignty? When North Korea sends people into labor camps for possessing South Korean television shows (it does), is there a colorable case that *their* national security justifies that? Or is that totally out of the question?
One'd have to twist themselves into pretzels to plead exceptionalism for their own country doing anything of this category.
(There's a further subtext that anyone on HN knows how to trivially circumvent such blocks, so, these rules inherently can never apply to HN commenters, ourselves—it's always other people, we'd wish to apply these rules to).
For one it runs into paradox of tolerance problems, for another it fallaciously relies on a "marketplace of ideas" to resolve friction which, despite the bumper sticker term, is not a real mechanism.
It's been a longstanding part of the fascist playbook to turn the norms of liberalism against itself, advocating for "free speech" when it helps actively amplify their message to audiences, and having no hesitation to abandon those purported principles once in power and able to censor opponents. Poof, there goes your free speech.
Principle agnostic approaches to freedom of expression lead to the collapse of democracies. Happened in Hungary, almost happened in Poland, and it's unfolding in the U.S. The point isn't that these idea's "win" in a marketplace of ideas but that they mobilize violent anti-democratic capacity.
So then let me ask you, do you feel like arbitrarily banning sites worked? Are we having less of a propaganda and misinformation as we are going ahead with the bans? Because if it's not actually working it sounds a lot like "it's not helping but at least it looks like we're doing something".
The problem is just getting bigger because 1) we aren't actually doing anything else (real) about it and 2) we even actively allow propaganda and misinformation on so many other channels it's laughable.
I said above, the people doing the banning just need a vehicle to carry their interests and justify their banning powers. Since they don't care about the problem itself, they don't care about any of the real measures that could tackle it. They pick the only one which gives them what they really want: power to arbitrarily control information. Russia is a great excuse today (and honestly, almost throughout their history) but it will be used against you tomorrow.
You don't even have to dig too far to see the exact same type of propaganda freely spread on X or Facebook, where the people actually are. RT is happily active there. Far right Musk is there. Can you even pretend that banning the rt.com site in Germany does anything towards the goal of curbing disinformation?
> If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack in a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
> just
So... you do both?
Y'all never made homeless people walk into the tobacco store to get cigs for you when you were kids? Or anyone who would do it for a quick buck.
The fact that some kids will still find ways to get them would be at least partially addressed by the "education" part of GP's comment. Even then, of course, some kids will still start smoking. Is that some kind of argument that we shouldn't do anything, or...?
> Is that some kind of argument that we shouldn't do anything, or...?
You keep trying to make it sound like we are doing "both". In reality we aren't doing the thing that works, and keep doing the thing that doesn't. The proof is that we live in a world with more disinformation on more channels than ever, while education is cratering.
So I guess the question is why are you pretending we're doing something useful about this? Why are you pretending the useless measure we keep applying needs to be applied nonetheless? Who convinced you that banning solves the problem when reality shows things getting worse and that if we pretend we "do both" it's as if we actually did?
Thank you for answering, pretty much my thoughts.
We do both, yet it does not work, so I ask the parent, now what do you suggest?
>door to arbitrary banning
lol the US has had that door removed
I see no way to have censorship and freedom and common good at the same time, so good of society is out of question - unless you don't value freedom at all.
It is a tool that entrenches current powers that be, system wise. Who decides what the "common" good is? the one in power.
It also hides societal problems and signals that could be used for policymaking.
The acceptance of censorship honestly scares me, and i grew up on stories of oppressive communist regime - full of censorship, secret police etc.
and frankly, commercial censorship might be even worse - it is a "for profit" enterprise, common good be damned.
and one last thing - even if you fully trust your current government, you're just one elections away from something vastly different. They will have access to the same powers that you've granted them(indirectly, by voting).
imho that is just silly ... I can see various ways censorship and freedom and common good at the same time. Actually, I can imagine different set ups where this could work...
But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?
On the other topic, I for one think that censorship of AI generated content and fake news, as well as AI generated ordering of results should be censored. But it's not that easy, and implementing that is an even bigger can of worms.
What is censorship for the "common" good? The point being that censorship is a top-down thing; it is not a "common" thing by definition.
Definition of Common good is doing what the political establishment sees as good for preserving their power.
It's not what's good for you, it's what's good for them.
This is some weird revisionism. The definition of a common good is what's good for a community.
Your definition is weird idealism from the past that doesn't work in today's corrupt political landscape.
>Traditionally in the west censorship was through copyright rights. It wasn’t considered censorship if you do it for money and business.
To me, those 2 sentences contradict each other. Doing it through copyright rights, and doing it for money and business sound pretty much the same to me. But you're saying that traditionally one wasn't considered censorship, but the other was considered censorship.
They are saying that it is censorship, it just largely wasn't (and isn't) considered such.
Copyright is not censorship.
Censorship is state/company mandated retraction or blockage of certain information. Copyright is state/company mandated blocking of certain forms of expression.
Copyright permits you to publish any idea you so desire, only that you don't plagiarize someone else while doing so. (Which is always possible, as the fair-use doctrine is a thing)
> Copyright is not censorship.
Copyright law is absolutely a justification of and mechanism for censorship.
It may arguably be socially beneficial censorship, but then that's what is claimed by proponents of every basis and means of censorship.
Copyright is definitely not censorship, Copyright is the framework implemented to create intellectual properties to allow for commercial exploitation of text, sound, images and some other intellectual output(details depend on jurisdiction).
Removal of content due to copyrights is censorship, you are being denied to spread or consume certain content. It's not different than defining that some content is protected with "national security" or however else you define it and then prevent the spread and consumption of it. Same thing, different excuse.
You can use placeholders to see it more clearly, i.e. "This content is X therefore in accordance to the law needs to be removed, failure to do so may lead to prosecution and penalties of Y"
You can replace X with anything, including "copyrighted material", "support for Hamas terrorism", "hate speech", "defamation of our glorious leader","communist propaganda", "capitalist propaganda", "self harm".
Is the removal of any content for any reason "censorship"? I don't think that fits conventional usage of the term, and broadening the scope of the word to that level removes much of its usefulness.
If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
> Is the removal of any content for any reason "censorship"? I don't think that fits conventional usage of the term
I think censorship is generally already considered to be any suppression of speech/communication/information. There are forms of censorship that many consider to be fine/justified, like taking down libel or removing inappropriate language in songs played on the radio, but it'd still conventionally be considered "censored".
The threat of 10 years in prison under the DMCA for providing information that lets people jailbreak/repair/reverse-engineer their own devices definitely fits the bill of censorship to me.
> If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
If you see some state/company secret that you weren't supposed to, and the government prevents you communicating about it, I'd say that's a form of censorship. I don't think it can be analogized to stealing an object in a meaningful way.
> If you see some state/company secret that you weren't supposed to...
Indeed, but that's not really what we are talking about with piracy, is it? State secrets and copyrighted material are clearly different things.
Yes it is censorship. A 3rd party decides what you can consume, the only difference between instances is that you may or may not agree with that.
I don't want to go into the copyright discussion. The only thing I will tell you is this and I won't follow up: Piracy is not theft, it's something else and removal of content to elevate the claimed harm is still censorship. Other censorship types all claim greater good too, the "good guys" in this digital world are not just the copyright lawyers.
I am not saying this from anti-copyright perspective, I'm not anti-copyright although I have issues with it and IMHO needs a reform.
> The only thing I will tell you is this and I won't follow up
Good faith dialogue is not possible under these self-imposed constraints.
Yes, and yes. Property is theft. Monopoly on objects which have virtually zero cost to be duplicated can't be justified by any moral ground, so it's basically only possible with corrupted mind enforcing this as social policy using psychological manipulation since garden, and every brutal means that can impose them in the obey or suffer dichotomy mindset.
You believing all property is theft is very avant-garde of you, but at the same time it is not a stance the vast majority of the world agrees with (including Germany), so it hardly seems relevant to a constructive conversation centered around the behavior of German ISPs.
> i don't think that fits conventional usage of the term
Then I think it's on you to provide an alternative definition to the one in the dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship
I'm very curious as to what you think the word means.
Which of these definitions do you think supports your case?
The most relevant Merriam Webster definition, which is actually under "censor (verb)", I reproduce here:
> to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable
Piracy is not typically considered bad due to being "objectionable", it is considered bad because many people/societies consider it equivalent to theft. You can obviously stretch the definition of objectionable to mean that, but it is on you to demonstrate that is a reasonable stretch. Blocking out sex scenes from a movie and removing pirated materials are obviously different actions, and this definition clearly refers to the former.
> freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only.
What a fun way to completely invalidate anyone who doesn't agree with you that "freedom is out of fashion"!
Yes, pre-empt the opposition Rumsfeld style and you ain't gotta worry about anyone taking that position any time soon #chat-with-ai
There is no technological solution. Only a political one. And I tell you already: voting is useless.
> And I tell you already: voting is useless.
If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states had voted last fall, none of the lawlessness that we’ve seen this year would have happened. The people telling you that voting is useless are enjoying the fruits of suckers believing them.
> If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states
The key part being "in a handful of states". There are many states in the country in which your vote is all but meaningless at the federal level. The Electoral College + relentless Gerrymandering that has been done over the past decades ensures that only a small fraction of eligible voters can cast meaningful votes. Makes it much easier to target and propagadandize those smaller groups. We saw it play out with Cambridge Analytica, but there hasn't been another "scandal" of that sort because it's just established practice now. Everyone has their hand in the pot doing the same thing, it's all above belt.
You should still vote, because you can enact change at the local + state levels, but the levers of federal power have been taken from the people.
You appear to be acknowledging that voting does matter, contrary to the previous sweeping claim.
Second, while some states may be unlikely to change their choice of president or senator, the local level matters quite a lot AND that’s where electoral reform will happen. If you don’t like the two party status quo, if you don’t like the electoral college, giving up on voting ensures defeat whereas supporting things like ranked-choice voting or the The National Popular Vote reform.
I kind of agree but think the upshot is exactly the reverse. First, swing states do matter as you acknowledge, which has exactly the opposite implication. Second, yes, by all means let's move beyond the Electoral college. There are organizations working to get a majority to sign the popular vote interstate compact. Check if your state is signed on and if not, I promise there's an org working on it that needs your help.
See? Same facts, but culminating in a call to action based on the premise that is affirmative of the value of democracy. If there was one person who mobilized this way for every ten who gave up in resignation it would be done already. But the battle against hedonic skepticism is hard.
> voting is useless
That also happens to be what the people in power would like you to believe.
How can you say that. Look at Trump.
I think this "derelicta" is actually advocating for Trumps position here so I bet "derelicta" has already had a look at Trump lol
More censorship is a good inventive to build really uncensorable protocols that ISPs can't mess with.
These protocols or revisions already exist - DNSSEC at the site level and DoT/DoH at the user level prevent this kind of malicious tampering with responses by the ISP.
The issue is that they're not commonly used, and even if that changes, the ISPs can roll out harder-to-bypass censorship methods like SNI inspection or IP blocks.
And webmasters can, in turn, ramp up the adoption of QUIC, ECH, IPv6, or bury their frontend in some CDN that you can't feasibly "IP ban" without massive collateral damage.
You can't win the war against corporate censorship and malicious anti-freedom politicians through purely technical means. But you can sure make it much harder for them.
> you can't feasibly "IP ban" without massive collateral damage.
Oh but they can, we are suffering this in Spain every weekend the football league plays.
Tons of Cloudflare IPs sent to a blackhole regardless of how many other non relevant websites are behind.
They block them during games only? Lmao thats some insane lobbying
They do, and they deny they are doing it. The thing works like this: Telefonica owns Movistar, who has the rights to soccer matches. A few webpages offer pirated streams to those matches, behind Cloudflare. Telefonica call the judges and hand them the Cloudflare IP (shared by thousands of sites), who are obviously ignorant about how internet works, through a special "urgent" protocol. As soon as Telefonica has the judge OK, they stop serving Cloudflare, affecting thousands. Their support forums start to boil, but they deny any issue. As soon as the match ends, Cloudflare is back again. This only affects Telefonica and O2 clients.
Some business are really angry because they claim their peak hour of the week is during the matches (e.g. wife buying online while husband watch the match)
Imagine if the radios we all carry with us everywhere could be programmed to communicate with each other.
(I'm not sure why I replied here. I guess I'm saying that establishing some kind of mesh network protocol between all cellphones would be a great addition to those other protocols you mentioned.)
Cellular modems are typically locked down completely to shit. But I know of a few LTE chips that can be obtained with no pre-burned vendor boot keys, and also have the vendor modem sources and toolchains leaked.
SNI blocking will hopefully be harder now that Let's Encrypt is rolling out IP certificates, so ECH becomes viable for websites that don't share an IP address with known-good websites (like Cloudflare tunnels). IP blocks will be the only solution on the normal web.
For everything else, there's I2P and Tor.
These don’t prevent censorship necessarily, they will give you a way to detect it at best.
DNSSEC gives you the ability to verify the DNS response. It doesn’t protect against a straight up packet sniffer or ISP tampering, it just allows you to detect that it has happened.
DoT/DoH are better, they will guarantee you receive the response the resolver wanted you to. And this will prevent ISP-level blocks. But the government can just pressure public resolvers to enact the changes at the public resolver level (as they are now doing in certain European countries).
You can use your own recursive, and this will actually circumvent most censorship (but not hijacking).
Hijacking is actually quite rare. ISPs are usually implementing the blocks at their resolver (or the government is mandating that public resolvers do). To actually block things more predictably, SNI is already very prevalent and generally a better ROI (because you need to have a packet sniffer to do either).
DNSSEC itself won't help you alone, but the combination of DNSSEC + ODoH/DoT will. Without DNSSEC, your (O)DoH/DoT server can mess with the DNS results as much as your ISP could.
Of course you will need to configure your DNS server/client to do local validation for this, and at most it'll prevent you from falling for scams or other domain foolery.
Ultimately it all ends on the physical layer. Those who control the physical layer can always suppress communication if they choose so. The only protocol ISP can't mess with is having an army big enough (and somehow the commanders of that army has to be motivated not to mess with the protocol for their own purposes).
The protocols already exist. Deploy an I2P router for an effective darknet on the internet, or set up Yggdrasil for a next-generation decentralized & private internet alternative.
An even easier start, just set up unfiltered encrypted DNS on your devices. E.g. Njalla DNS or Mullvad DNS. Or get a good VPN such as Mullvad.
At the same time, keep voting for privacy. And send letters to your politicians!
It's great to have alternatives but in practice those don't really get adoption (until a catastrophe has already happened) and during regular times their usage tends to put a target on your back.
No, more censorship is a reason to vote better governments not to find workaround while accepting tyranny.
The workarounds on this page mostly suggest to use large public resolvers. Feature request (not sure if the author is on HN): it would be interesting to know which domains are blocked by 9.9.9.9, 1.1.1.1, and especially the new DNS4EU service.
Thanks so much for this. I never heard about DNS4EU before.
https://www.joindns4.eu/about
Sadly dns4eu does not support dnscrypt protocol which is deal-breaker in 2025 if you ask me.
Why isn't DoT sufficient?
I am not an expert but I read this website [1] and got impression that dns-over-tls is first iteration of encrypted dns and dnscrpyt protocol is second iteration of encrypted dns fixing its problems. Also dns-over-tls is not supported by package dnscrypt-proxy2 on openwrt and I have personal bias for not configuring dns-over-https on routers (in my opinion https is too complex protocol and have risk of getting hacked). Maybe I am alone with my opinions - I do not know. I wanted to use dns4eu and got really disappointed with not supporting dnscrypt. That's all.
[1] https://dnscrypt.info/faq
By looking the list of negative sides of DNS over TLS (DoT) in there, this project seems to list artificial problems, which makes me want to avoid the whole project. Maybe there are real benefits on using this protocol, but they should not make the list of problems looking longer than it actually is.
The project especially lists the problems of TLS. TLS is one of the most understood, tested, and well-defined protocols that can be abstracted away in implementation level. Nothing also prevents forcing TLS 1.3 which removes most of the described other problems.
This especially sounds odd:
> Questionable practical benefits over DoH
But DoH brings the full TLS stack and also the HTTP stack as well? At the same time the project complains about increased attack surface in DoT, but DoH just extends it even more.
If I also look the DoH list, there is
> Requires TCP
But just few lines befeore, they say that DoH supports HTTP/3 which is UDP.
E.g. Android has supported it 3 years already:
https://security.googleblog.com/2022/07/dns-over-http3-in-an...
Few years ago I would have been happy about such a service in EU level. Now I just fear how they are planning to misuse it.
Tangent: does anybody know which DNS server software that providers like dns4eu and nextdns use ?
Are they using nsd or bind or … did they write their own?
These stories and the stories about going after people who are torrenting in much more aggressive manner make my puzzle by Proton decision to relocate to Germany from Switzerland over some proposed law. I understand that it would make it harder to operate with protecting privacy but I would wonder why relocating to Germany, what would the Swiss government do that would be worse than the current situation in Germany?
I did not go though the details of the proposed Swiss law to be honest so it might be obvious why they are doing that but still why Germany instead of some other place (like Mullvad being in Sweden) ?
I am Swiss, but haven't looked into this in detail. My understanding is that the new law basically would require logging user data, with a six-month retention. While this isn't great, the EU is continually pressing for backdoors in encryption. That's far worse.
Hence, I think Proton's move is really about reducing costs, with the potential Swiss law as an excuse.
When domains are seized, does the new "owner" pay the registration renewals? If so, what's to stop someone from doing this:
- create a vanity TLD with high renewal fees
- register a bunch of sites that are mirrors of already seized domains
- mention them in enough places they get noticed
- ???
- profit
These domains aren't being seized, they are being blocked. In this case, as per TFA, they're just overriding the domain nameserver at the ISP default DNS server.
Even if they were actually seized, do you think if the police seize a rental car they'll be paying the rental fee until they give it back?
Seizing a domain probably costs way more in procedures than any renewal fees.
Also, blocking websites typically doesn't involve ICANN, the infringing website still owns the domain. They just order ISPs in the country to lie on some DNS queries, which is the reason why such blocks are so easy to work around.
I don't think governments seizing domains are paying anything.
Step 1 there is a bit of a "draw the rest of the owl"
Germany is so backward in stuff like this, skilled engineers should just move to the free world and leave them with their insolvent pensions.
Define free world.
That's already happening
Where is the free world? Certainly not the US with Trump around.
So this entire censorship scheme is bypassed by using 8.8.8.8 or the like?
What about simply running ‘unbound’ yourself?
Initially, this will be used exactly as intended and therefore seen as good. After about ~10 years it will include other "objectionable" material and a good case will be made for it so most people will not necessarily realize it.
What options are there? Do we have a reliable distributed DNS? I'm genuinely asking, because I've just realized that for the past 7 years I've been happily using my provider's DNS server and never thought of it.
But now, I'm seriously considering something better than that.
Ah telefonica… that’s Spanish, same company that every weekend blocks cloudfare in order to “avoid” football piracy. They don’t believe in laws, well they believe that laws are for the plebs not for them, the elites
Not just Telefónica. Yesterday was a Saturday so I couldn't access a crapton of websites from any of 3 different ISPs. It's getting really old at this point.
> Yesterday was a Saturday so I couldn't access a crapton of websites from any of 3 different ISPs
Wait, is that why yesterday internet was so janky? Encountered multiple websites that seemed offline when visited from my home (Spain) Vodafone connection, but all my remote servers could still access them. In my decade+ of living here, never heard of them doing a "Ah today it's Saturday, lets block Cloudflare" thing until this very moment. Have any resources (Spanish or English) where I can read more about this? Fucking ridiculous if this is true.
Yup. Been going on for a few months already. Here are some links:
https://www.eleconomista.es/tecnologia/noticias/13287968/03/...
https://vercel.com/blog/update-on-spain-and-laliga-blocks-of...
https://tebas.tv/
It seems like more and more ISPs are doing that: https://koreanrandom.com/forum/topic/85072-modxvm-problem-in...
They also mention Movistar, O2, and Vodafone. A systematic violation of the internet's integrity, carried out on the scale of an entire so-called "free" EU(!) country. It's a disaster.
It’s most, yes. Due to a court order. But Telefonica are the ones who owns the domestic broadcasting soccer rights this season and past.
I understand it's just rhetorics, but I am amused by the idea of some ISP managers considering themselves "the elites".
> the idea of some ISP managers considering themselves "the elites".
Can you lock millions of users out of Internet? If that's not elite in 2025, who is?
They are. Spanish organizations , the c-suite is always there by nepotism
You can say "the elites" in Telefonica case, because is heavily under the Spanish socialist party control.
Pedro Sanchez forced a public investment (€1134 billion) into that company using the SEPI so he can control Telefonica. Then he changed Telefonica president with a socialist pawn, inserted many socialist "elite" into the company, and as a cherry on top, he embedded Huawei inside Telefonica core systems.
Lol at Tebas and LaLiga, so "socialists"...
Listen, kids, the higher you get into politics, the faster the textbooks (Marx, Smith, and antything in between) get tossed out of a window and drugs, prostitutes and hard power it's what matters.
Better if you don't know how actual politics work, because it that would be pure Realpolitiks. Imagine an 1984 and a Brave New World merded and psychos on top keeping the illusion because of raw power. You have that today.
The closest against to that would be the EFF, Richard Stallman, and hardcore groups and humanists working maybe for pride, but helping the rest of the society as the main social law (Golden Rule).
But we are not ready. We have a 'hardware' from Neolitics and a 'software' from the Space Era... no wonder the are wars and hardcore collisions between ideologies...
What about this:
“Your internet provider can’t block or throttle websites. The open web stays open.” Open Internet (Net Neutrality) Regulation (EU) 2015/2120 Official text on EUR-Lex
well, there will always be conflicting laws, and it is exactly the job of the courts to figure out which law ranks higher.
I cannot stress that enough: do not use your ISP provided DNS.
Just checked the list of blocked domains, and my very first try if I can open it, I got also a censorship website from the spanish government (I'm in spain, provider is DIGI) for fitgirl-repacks.site - other (mostly german) piracy sites from the list open fine.
Spain here too, Vodafone, and fitgirl-repacks.site also displays "ESTÁ USTED INTENTANDO ACCEDER A UN SITIO WEB ILEGAL" if I accept the (obviously) mismatched certificate they're using.
Surprisingly, thepiratebay.org is available for me though without issues. My previous ISPs here (Movistar, Orange, Jazztel) were all blocking thepiratebay.org
Seems to be pretty hit/miss what exact domains various ISPs block here. I would have imagined the police/courts serve like a centralized .txt file (simplified) the ISPs just fetch once a day or whatever, but seems to be way less organized than that, for better or worse.
just set my DNS to 1.1.1.1 and am no longer bothered with that censorship.
But now you are telling CloudFlare about every domain you visit.
You are right. Found out there is also DNS4EU with a bit more privacy-friendly orientation. How much they log, well, unless they get audited, I won't know.
Simply use https://quad9.net/ 9.9.9.9 instead.
In germany its not possible to sue them for the information? Or it would cost too much? It should be publicly available what the public can't visit.
So basically, we need a new way of contact DoH multiple DNS's for a probabilistic response for a site. Ideally, you could also verify geographically different ASNs, including opposing countries to get around legal idiocy.
Even better, do this resolution over Tor.
Doing that would bypass any state level stupidity, inflicted by an oligopoly, state actors, or similar.
As we all experienced, there is always somebody that wants to "protect" us: and so often is the state
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The legal basis is explained here [0] . Funny thing is that in contrast to what the OP says the German net agency says that the CUII needs a court decision:
>A rights holder represented in the CUII can find copyright infringements and then file a lawsuit with the court for the implementation of a DNS block. If the court decides that a DNS block is lawful, this block is implemented by the Internet access providers organized in the CUII. The prerequisites for a blocking claim against the Internet access provider pursuant to § 8 DDG are met, - if a rights holder can prove his copyright, - his works are published on the Internet without his consent, - he has no other way of remedying the infringement, - if the blocking is reasonable and proportionate.
[0] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Digitales/Sch...
Since July that is, OP posts about it as well. This post is from February.
Great to hear! OP probably had some part in that. Just read the blog post [0]
[0] https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up
Let us all cry rivers for rt.com
Unlike censorship on US-owned social media platforms where the female nipple is banned for some reason.
Time to break out the 20 Germany bad demographic maps that dovetail-overlay with East Germany and Afd. Or the fire set by Russian agents that destroyed 1,400 Vietnamese owned businesses in Poland. Were those suppressed in Germany?
I think the main problem is that Germany does not have a constitutional equivalent to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Instead, each federal state and the federal government have fragmented information access laws, often with broad exemptions for official secrecy.
In many cases, even investigative journalists cannot obtain details about governance processes and decisions made behind closed doors. The government often cites strict data protection rules and uses them as a shield against disclosure.
Another example: In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement. If someone feels they have been treated "unfairly", good luck to prove that in court when two officers present a completely different version of events, especially since body cameras are very rare in germany.
> I think the main problem is that Germany does not have a constitutional equivalent to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Instead, each federal state and the federal government have fragmented information access laws, often with broad exemptions for official secrecy.
At first sight, I don't see how the FOIA is much different to the Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (freedom of information law). https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informationsfreiheitsgesetz
Isn't the FOIA also applied on the federal level?
> In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement
I think this is misleading. It's not especially prohibited. Generally, law enforcement enjoys the same rights as everyone else, that is having a right to privacy and the confidentiality of the spoken, non-public word. You can't film law enforcement folks preemptively, or without cause, if they have the reasonable expectation of confidentiality of the spoken word. If law enforcement is breaking the law, you are allowed to collect video evidence. In any case, you are not allowed to publish non-public video recordings or pictures of anyone, taken without explicit, or implicit consent. Public or non-public here means the implied confidentiality of communication, not necessarily where it happened. Eg. talking on a public street doesn't make every conversation public.
Mind you, in Germany, illegally obtained evidence isn't as easily dismissed as it is in the US. If you record the police without cause (illegally) and they happen to commit a crime, your recording isn't tainted evidence as far as I know, but rather you may (if indicted) face legal consequences yourself, independently. Again, publication is a completely different matter.
Legality of video recordings is pretty much irrelevant, regarding the legal power dynamics you described, as the police could just confiscate your phone and find some excuse for destroying the evidence. Independent oversight seems more important to address this.
On the other hand, I do think law enforcement should enjoy privacy, generally, as everyone else. I don't think, having a camera in your face with every interaction is helpful for anyone, all things considered, but would rather aid escalation and discourage leniency. Constant video surveillance just sucks, no matter who is doing the recording.
>political (like rt.com)
Honestly, wartime foreign media blocking is the only justified censorship type IMHO. Even then I would say that should be accessible with a delay. Why? Because media is is part of the tools in the war, up until the last day before the invasion Moscow officials on Twitter were mocking USA and other western leaders warning that Russia has troops build up and the invasion was imminent. The traditional Russian media was also writing articles about this. This was putting political pressure on the Western leaders, portraying them as warmongers reducing their credibility etc. Then suddenly one night Putin had 55min speech on why it was the West was the actual invaders and started the invasion. To this day, the Russian propaganda holds strong and awful lot of people are convinced that it is Russia who is facing invasion and is fighting bravely against the aggressors. Including the US administration since a few months.
On the other hand, complete permanent blocking also undermines populations assessment of the reality. As it turned out, the West wasn't also entirely truthful on the progress of the war and the effectiveness of the sanctions.
I don't know maybe we should have safeguards instead of censorship.
Except in the case of rt.com it's completely justified
I'd go further and say that Germany is not part of the (general) internet. From the top of my head I can list 5-10 domains that are blocked. No site explaining, just "this site can't be reached". Reasons are piracy, pornography, politics. And the biggest problem is that it's being widely defended with many voices to increase that censorship.
I've never ran into a DNS blocked domain, so I am really curious which 10 domains from the top of your head are blocked on the DNS level, specifically in Germany?
I'm not sure if porn or piracy links would fly here. But as others suggested, rt.com is blocked. And I know at least one other political one
At least we can say fuck on TV and aren’t afraid of showing a naked female breast.
But when you call a politician "Schwachkopf" your house gets raided. I guess you have to take the bad with the good.
Or "so 1 Pimmel" ("such 1 penis")
The raid was because of allegedly antisemitic post, but they totally botched the warrant. The mentioned antisemitism in the title but not in the reasons.
And it happened in Bavaria, not the biggest fans of the Green party, so it‘s a little bit strange that the state attorney went with a raid.
I assume you mean to contrast with the US. Things are not as you stereotype them. Re profanity, cases such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_v._Fox_Television_Stations... are instructive. Re nudity, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State... (which also has more information on the aforementioned case):
> In 1964, The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger, was initially rejected because of two scenes in which the actresses Linda Geiser and Thelma Oliver fully expose their breasts; and a sex scene between Oliver and Jaime Sánchez, which it described as "unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful." ... On a 6–3 vote, the MPAA granted the film an "exception" conditional on "reduction in the length of the scenes which the Production Code Administration found unapprovable." The exception to the code was granted as a "special and unique case", and was described by The New York Times at the time as "an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent."[63] The requested reductions of nudity were minimal, and the outcome was viewed in the media as a victory for the film's producers.[62] The Pawnbroker was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval. ...
See also https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ix309/e... .
They ran a TV channel without broadcasting license. Which country allows this?
> bigger than one would think
Why in heaven's name would anyone think that censorship is NOT super heavy-handed in Germany?
Does Germany have a recent or historical track record of EVER being a liberal-minded place?
Yes, it absolutely does.
For understandable reasons, censorship in particular of Holocaust and Nazi-related imagery is especially heavy-handed in Germany. Among other things, this has led to bans of several video games (note how much space is dedicated to Germany on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_by_...) that were relatively popular and uncontroversial in North America, particularly ones with an eye to historic simulation. The context of depicting the Nazis as unquestionably the bad guys who you as a player character must vanquish, does not matter to the censors.
> For understandable reasons
There is no such thing as "understandable" when it comes to censorship, especially when it comes to Nazi imagery, and especially in Germany.
If there's actually one place where it needs to be remembered, it's absolutely there.
It absolutely is remembered in Germany. There are museums dedicated to the topic, even.
They just aren't displaying the insignia of the Reich.
I live in Germany. I just opened it and it loaded just fine.
Once again someone spreading Russian FUD.
Just tested, and it's blocked on Deutsche Telekom & O2 mobile.
At least mobile telekom and my local landline ISP resolve it fine.
Are you using a third-party DNS like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8?
Just tried and it's blocked on Telekom with the default DNS.
It's been well documented that some ISPs are blocking it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperrungen_von_Internetinhalte...
FWIW I was also sceptical, but just tried it from my phone network and it seems indeed blocked. Wouldn't be the first case of different ISPs using different block-lists. c.f. bs.to
No problem from Telekom mobile and residential the biggest provider by a humongous margin.
That is not true
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Not parent but I'm skeptical because normalizing blocking is a very real slippery slope. Last night I debugged an issue with one of my apps for 1h, it turned out one of the Cloudflare IPs my device got were legally blocked in Spain. Not even ISP DNS, but the IP. And this is because of some CF customer hosting a football (soccer) streaming site. This is the new normal, in a democratic country. What the post is talking about in Germany seems similar. And these are democratic countries with many constitutional freedoms. This is not a hypothetical, but happening today. ID verification is already implemented in the UK. Chat control is possibly next.
So let me flip the question: if a certain thing is illegal in a jurisdiction, but hosted outside, is it justified to block access to the hosting provider (notably, including Cloudflare and other giants)?
I would. Appetite for censorship should be measured against something I find unpalatable. When one starts down the road of making decisions for others - it is only a question of time before someone does the same for you with possibly a different perspective. The moment one finds themselves outside the groupthink on spaces vs tabs, I'd like that bar to be as far away as possible.
> The moment one finds themselves outside the groupthink
The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do). The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.
If there's nothing wrong with what is being said, then why should it matter who says it? Does propaganda somehow gain effectiveness because it comes "from the source"?
Sanctions are about impinging others freedom because they’re behaving badly.
“Why can’t I play with the kid who is in timeout? Is it because you hate my freedom?”
Except your analogy here should be more "there's a kid on timeout so nobody gets to play, just in case"
I would think that enforcing economic sanctions would be a far more effective use of time and effort.
Shutting down a business = economic sanctions. Blocking domain of a web publication is part of shutting it down.
What do you prefer instead, to make domain registrars enforce sanctions instead of blocking on DNS level? That would quickly make so that no one with Russian passport is able to register a domain no matter how much we are against russia or putin
Because the people writing the laws within the EU are also acutely aware that phrasing this ban too broadly constrains freedom of speech. The way the ban is handed is walking the fine line between impinging freedom of speech and denying a enemy state from waging an information war. Romania had to rerun an election due to Russian inference, this isn’t just a phantom the EU made up to censor opinions it doesn’t like.
> The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.
And ... ?
Do you think allowing an enemy state free reign to broadcast propaganda to your population makes good tactical sense?
Freedom of speech rarely makes "tactical sense", which is why we as citizens need to continually fight for it.
The irony of freedom of speech, much like democracy in general, is that it can destroy itself.
This is inconsistent with the upthread argument:
> The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do).
It is not. People are allowed to do what they will, as long as those people are not the outlet itself. The propaganda outlet loses control over it and cannot push the media through, only hope that others pull it from them.
The difference is they're not an enemy sovereign state. This isn't contradictory or illogical.
paradox of tolerance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
somehow missed the fact that the EU has declared war already
You don't need to declare war to have enemies. After all, Russia has launched chemical and radiological attacks on EU states.
If you believe in any kind of system of morality, it's absolutely possible for one's own government to be in the moral wrong and the enemy government to be in the moral right. Censorship means the citizens may never learn that their country is the bad guy in that case.
Some people really do not need their holidays north of Seoul prevented
Right, but as long as you wage genocide against non-Europeans then Europe will not only support you, but will go after the people protesting it. That's the morals of European leaders today.
Every person and institution have a limited number of flips to give
My GAF meter is pretty low for anti-secular groups that shot first. And their own neighbours who were "supposed" to be their allied seem to think the same
Apart from the fact that you seem to be equating a whole people with one group, you also seem to conveniently not realize that the government committing the genocide is a non-secular messianic one, with a deep seated belief of the superiority of their own religious group over any other, but particularly feel themselves superior to the people they occupy for decades, who of course despite them being occupied are always supposed to find compassion and understanding for their occupier first, otherwise the occupation cannot end, right?
There were and are plenty of reasonable groups one could work with, but the genocide is about grabbing land, asserting dominance and exacting revenge, while feeding a victimhood complex that is never able to acknowledge its own mistakes.
So why haven't we banned Israeli news sites and companies for their war/genocide in Gaza?
Because Israel is not engaged in a war against Europe.
Russia is also not engaged in a direct war with Europe yet we still sanction them because they are by proxy, similar to Israel: Israel's actions in Gaza are creating waves of refugees that Europe has to take in, and then we have the potential terrorist attacks by those people as revenge for Europe's military aid to Israel who see Europe as partly to blame for destruction of their home country.
Israel definitely should be sanctioned till it stops its war crimes because doing nothing will directly affect us.
Russia has attacked Ukraine. Not Europe.
Neither Ukraine nor Israel is part of EU or NATO.
> Russia has attacked Ukraine.
Moldova and Georgia and Ukraine, as relates to its aggression in Europe.
> Russia has attacked Ukraine. Not Europe.
Ukraine is most definitely a part of Europe.
Yes, and so is big parts of Russia. Attacking one country is not the same as attacking a continent.
i would like to remind you that Germany was one of the biggest recipients of russian gas in Europe, and worked actively to keep it flowing despite the war, and didn't try to break away from their dependence for a very long time.
It's pure hypocrisy coupled with conformity - or rather virtue signalling. Send junk weapons to Ukraine to showcase that you do support the cause, meanwhile keep buying gas the same time go after their propaganda because that looks nice.
There is a difference I think between unpalatable content (that you disagree with, that you find incorrect, and so on) and content generated with the specific purpose of deceiving the reader.
I used to be a hardline freedom of information defender, but we must face the fact that humanity has become way too good at manufactoring opinions and even facts. We're exposed to this threat at all levels, from your local company invading your feed with hidden ads in legitimate tiktok content to nation states influencing your political worldview.
Considering yourself immune to this manipulation is as naive as thinking you don't need vaccines - depressingly, we've far beyond the point where individual protection is enough.
>I would. Appetite for censorship should be measured against something I find unpalatable.
In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished.
Now imagine you have a Ruzzian TV station publishing hard core porn for children to see, how to you punsish them without paid trolls claiming censorship ? Because this si what happens, in Romania Romanian TV station need to respect the Romanian laws , liek for example pay fines and retract any falsehoods and mistakes, but Ruzzians can publish fake documents and videos and if we want them to respect the laws of our countries we it is censorship... blocking faked documents is bad, blocking boobs is good in the land of the free
> In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished
rt hasn't done this and there are concrete laws against doing this, if rt violated them, they would/should fined/suspended, it's really that simple, do you have any real examples of illegal things they've carried out?
and if you're implying that extrajudicial measures are the only effective method to deal w/ situations like these, then there's an issue w/ the laws
just because censorship is carried out against a cause you don't like, doesn't make it justified, since it's very likely to be used in less benevolent ways in the future
It is similar to the problem of pornography online.
If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to watch your kids and install a porn filter on their computer / tv / phones. It is pointless to have websites to verify that you are old enough, as there always be websites from abroad who will not respect the law, and it forces you to leak your identity (who becomes tied to your IP address).
If you are not happy with propaganda, it is your role and the role of schools to educate people around about how to consume information and look with a critical view.
Propaganda affects everyone, not just kids. It even affects people with university studies but who have given up thinking for themselves. The problem is that they authorities are banning websites, while social media is riddled with propaganda. They claim to do something which clearly doesn't work.
The Internet used to be cool in the '90 when it wasn't regulated and Meta, Google and Tiktok didn't exist. Now it's all ads, propaganda and hate speech.
> ads, propaganda and hate speech
Just think about this (which is not 100% correct, but for the sake of discussion): it's probably not meta, google and tiktok. It's the internet peoples who are the source of all that. It's peoples who say hate, who push for ideas they believe in, and they also (surprise!) publish ads! (While google et cetera are just a medium, with lots of moderation, yep.).
I don’t think your porn comparison works because normally what happens is governments set rules about what content can be shown at what times. In the UK, we call it the “watershed”.
Setting limits on what content can be shown at what times isn’t censorship because you’re not actually censoring content. What you’re doing is setting rules about scheduling content.
What you actually need is to have a feature on iPhone / Android (and on the home Wi-Fi) to block porn and that parents can enter a pin-code to unlock that, if you consider this is non-acceptable in your family.
Some broadcasters do already have this feature. For example if you watch adult content (doesn’t have to be nudity, could be violent shows or other content that isnt considered appropriate for children) on SkyTV (UK satellite) then then you get promoted for a pin if its before 9pm.
The thing I referred to in my previous comment is more of a historical thing before smart TVs and similar tech. Current RF technology is still just an evolution of the same signals sent 70+ years ago. So they’d moderate content via scheduling. “Terrestrial TV” still works that way today.
Clear case of "motive justifies the means". I think in a free democracy, no one should block any propaganda, as it the responsibility of the individual to asses what to read and what not. In a democracy, it is more dangerous to censor and justify the means with motive - this opens the door to unjust censorship.
The best counter-argument I can provide to your wonderful ideal is that people are stupid, and they are vulnerable to being manipulated into believing dangerous peace-disrupting falsehoods by propaganda.
Spinning your thoughts further, you assume that stupidity is not some kind of freedom that you get to enjoy in a democracy. The opposite is true, people are free to be stupid, and if the majority is stupid, the smart people have to give in to the fact that stupid people make the rules (by voting).
The whole idea of supressing stupidity in a democracy leads to some sort of elitist society.
>The whole idea of supressing stupidity in a democracy leads to some sort of elitist society.
there's nothing wrong with this. Stable democracies tend to be republican and elitist. One of the reasons why the US has been, until recently, an exceptionally stable country was because decision making was largely insulated from the whims of the public. Democracy properly understood is best used as a tool for legitimacy and as a check against the worst abuses of power, not actually as a tool for decision making.
Having the inmates run the asylum is generally a bad idea, we've known this since Plato.
If the people are too stupid to discern propaganda from truth, then they are too stupid to vote.
Nobody is immune to propaganda. Thinking you are paradoxically makes you more susceptible.
What if at the end of the day, that propaganda does work and leaving it unopposed is as much a danger to democracy as censorship? It seems like a scenario where you have to pick your poison now, the last 100 years have shown populations can be manipulated.
Democracy is sneaky refined domination, subtle enough that masses do not see through it, but it is elites controlling the masses.
At the end, this political system is about supporting current power who settled by force (and to whom you have to pay a tax to not be sent into physical jail, and all your belongings taken).
Remember that at the beginning, these nice people are actually people who killed to be in place, and collected a lot of power and money, and that are now defending their position.
Kingdoms, then Dictatorship were too unstable, and this gave birth to Democracy, still with the same elites.
In some way, it is a softer continuation of conquest-coercion dressed as consent.
The newest generations use propaganda to settle; the approach changes, but the goal is ultimately the same.
That description fits any authority, not just democratic. The state is an apparatus of coercion. Always was, always will be.
Sadly yes. Even original Greek democracy was completely broken (women couldn't vote for example, like in many countries even recently).
There is a saying: if voting would change things, it is long time that it would have been forbidden
What would you propose instead of democracy?
> Clear case of "motive justifies the means".
Except, in the case of RT, it was not justified in an abstract way at all. Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.
To put it another way, if a judge can imprison a murderer for life as justified by the motive of reducing murders, what's stopping them from imprisoning everyone with no justification at all? Well, in practice the evidence required is quite a hurdle to this.
If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused, then you're arguing against the concept of punitive action outright.
It used to be common sense among non-authoritarians, that propaganda just becomes more potent from suppression.
Plenty of people have never seen moon hoax theorists' propaganda. They imagine if they see it, they'll quickly see through it for its absurdity. But they're often wrong. Moon hoax theorist's propaganda is actually much better than you think. They can point out lots of "inconsistencies", which do have an explanation, but aren't immediately obvious at all. You see they have experience meeting people like you, but you don't have experience meeting people like them.
I used moon hoaxers as an example because their sophisticated propaganda actually have been exposed and explained a few times, although it still isn't common knowledge why e.g. it seems the exact same rock is right behind an astronaut in two different photos. But that isn't nearly as true for suppressed ideologies. You haven't heard their arguments.
Your example of moon landing theories isn't an apt comparison because you're picking a fringe group. RT already had millions of international followers on Facebook, YouTube, etc., often more than high quality journalism outlets. I've been online long enough to see RT showing up uninvited in my feeds before.
Consider the cost of the sites I listed. Literally, how do you pay these companies? With the monetization of your attention, first and foremost. Good journalism costs money to produce, leaving good journalists unable to be the highest bidder.
Point is, you should be glad the attempt at censoring RT fails pretty bad.
If it had been more effective, more people would become very impressed the first time they came across a new to them, consistent (more or less!) narrative universe in which the bad guys are the good guys. Not only that, but their narrative incorporates a bunch of entirely true, verifiable damning truths about "our" side.
> Verifiable damning truths about "our" side
I don't have a side in terms of a political entity or official, I'm defending evidence-based action. I genuinely think my life is better because I don't have to defend anyone uncritically, but you're welcome to try and change my mind I guess lol
> Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.... If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused
Can you give a concrete example? (Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered, in years of people denigrating RT on the Internet.)
Sure, they reported that Jewish individuals had to flee Ukraine due to a Nazi takeover and a supposed ongoing genocide. There's no evidence of the fleeing or the genocide happening. This was one of the false narratives cited in the EU court's ruling.
> Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered
I err on the side of brevity, not seeing a claim that RT's removal was unjust in the comment I was responding to, I felt no need to justify it myself.
It's true, Russia could be said to engage in full-blown hybrid warfare according to some definitions. I don't want to downplay what they do at all.
But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.
> But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.
Just because two things superficially share some traits doesn't mean they are equivalent, at all. "Full-blown warfare against their own populations" is a bit dramatic, don't you think? As a German, I can tell you, while the government doesn't much act to my benefit, I am not exactly at war with them either. Intelligence, military and police don't have the competence or power, either. Most importantly, like in many proper democracies, there is a plurality of opinions and oversight in parliament, which prevents this sort of thing at scale. "Full-blown warfare" would imply a grand conspiracy, that's simply not factual.
Apart from the UK, Hungary and Poland, I think that's true for most western countries. The US is a bit exceptional, of course, since... well, I don't know what the fuck they are smoking there.
I didn't get the impression they were making any value judgement
You’re right. I guess I am. I’m pretty happy RT is blocked.
Why?
Because it’s turning out that too many people are susceptible to (this specific, but also other) propaganda.
If you think the masses are too susceptible to unapproved propaganda to the extent we have to censor it, it’s not clear to me that you can consistently believe democracy should be your form of government, as opposed to some sort of rule by experts/the rich/the educated/aristocrats/something else. It’s effectively saying the masses get a choice unless it’s the wrong choice.
I believe in democracy. If people want to listen to ridiculous and false Russian propaganda or support Russia against Ukraine they should be able to without hindrance, even if their politicians or the better informed don’t like it. It’s their job to persuade their fellows. They shouldn’t get to declare their beliefs are right and beyond democratic contestation.
Sometimes democracies make really bad decisions. Alciabiades conned the Athenians into the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. That’s the tradeoff you get for having a democracy. Declaring some subjects out of bounds is taking away democracy and installing something else instead, with those tradeoffs, that we as a society decided we weren’t going to make, without consensus.
Some people mainly come to political positions for emotional reasons rather than substantive ones. These people are generally easy to reach for populists and propagandists.
Many of the real problems in society, unfortunately, have no easy solutions and require very substantive evaluation, weighing expert opinions, etc. In the current environment it has become very hard to get a lot of people to even consider these or, if they want, elect someone to do it in their stead.
TLDR: populism + propaganda causes significant dysfunction in democracies, especially ones that aren’t winner-takes-all.
> Some people mainly come to political positions for emotional reasons rather than substantive ones
As opposed to your positions. The masses, well, they think wrong, but you, you thought long and hard about everything and you came to the right conclusions.
What's next? Give the right to vote only to the "right" people?
After all, if you can't trust the judgment of the masses because their views are based mainly on emotional reasons then surely you don't think they should have a say in how their country should be run?
I realize very well the problems of following this line of thought. But clearly populism combined with propaganda isn’t working out either in a number of countries. Should we just stop thinking about causes and what could be done about it, because it’s uncomfortable to think about it?
This is not an ad-hominem attack.
You are presenting an argument and I am pointing out the flaws in it.
I am also presenting the logical conclusion of your argument that maybe you were not comfortable making in your original comment, that is that a certain part of the population is not capable of thinking rationally and therefore, someone else must decide what they should be able to see, hear and read because otherwise they may make the "wrong" choices.
That, in turn implies that their votes could be also swayed by emotional reasons, so if you think that these people are not capable of making up their own mind about the issues that we face today, then surely, you are not fine with having them express their opinion in the voting booth.
> But clearly populism combined with propaganda isn’t working out either in a number of countries.
So your solution to populism is to refrain the population from accessing views that you find problematic?
> I realize very well the problems of following this line of thought
I don't think you do because if you did then you would know that having the state decide what citizens should have the right to see or hear is exactly the same kind of rhetoric that authoritarian regimes use today.
> Should we just stop thinking about causes and what could be done about it, because it’s uncomfortable to think about it?
I don't think anyone is feeling uncomfortable looking at the many issues that the western democracies are facing today.
I am uncomfortable however when someone thinks that the solution to these problems is to go down the path of censorship because sooner or later someone will use the same excuse to start censoring political opponents/ so-called undesirable views in the name of saving democracies or protecting the children or fighting terrorism as it has been seen time and time again.
The solution to the views that you find problematic such as the ones expressed on RT is not found in the reduction of free speech, it is done through education and demonstration of the facts.
So, if democracy means you have to trust people to make up their mind and decide for themselves, unconditionally, then why is there hardly any system with even elements of direct democracy (in contrast to the parliamentary/representative approach)?
None of these problems are new. The problems have been well-understood since the founding of all Western democracies and we accepted that trade off, as we decided the alternative systems were all worse. You can find this very debate in newspapers and CC notes (in America)at the time, about “false rumors” stirred up by “designing men.”
These are all the exact same arguments made by regimes like the CCP as to why their authoritarian methods are necessary. It’s all for the public order and the public good as unfortunately, many people are stirred up even against their own interest by meddlers, demagogues, and foreign interests. Fortunately, the CCP knows better, as the Party makes sure that the experts are making decisions based on all the data.
I would prefer to live in a democracy, and it astounds me to see people in the West repeating word for word what Russians and Chinese regime apologists say about their governments, all while explaining it’s all necessary to protect democracy.
> It’s their job to persuade their fellows.
Sorry, I'm more confortable with RT being blocked than having another Adolf Hitler screaming their own propaganda.
Screw Russia and China. The Internet blocking committee should probably also block Tiktok while they're at it, as it makes people's brains rot.
> Sorry, I'm more confortable with RT being blocked than having another Adolf Hitler screaming their own propaganda.
Is that really a good example? Weimar Germany regularly suppressed and censored Nazi newspapers and publications, shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers, and even at one point suppressed party gatherings.[1] Obviously, it did not work, and the Nazis used the same laws and precedent to suppress their enemies when they took power, and were able to campaign with statements like "in all of Germany, why are WE silenced?"
You can take two things away from this:
1. Weimar should have suppressed the Nazis EVEN HARDER. Weimar needed an even more stringent censorship regime, shutting down any publication and arresting the editors at the slightest whiff of wrongthink. They should have deployed informers to identify and arrest dissidents before they broke out into the public arena.
OR
2. Weimar Germany was a deeply unpopular and dysfunctional regime that had already failed. Governments should do better to represent the interests of their people so that things never get to that point. The Nazis would never have obtained any power if Germany had been doing well and people felt represented by their government, no matter what kind of crazy propaganda they put out; people don't choose extremism because of propaganda, they become propagandized when they are deeply disaffected. Censorship only further delegitimized the regime and increased the popularity of the Nazis, as it showed they were a threat to the people in power that were perceived to be mismanaging the country.
[1] https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...
You are comfortable with the blocking until the politicians start blocking something you care about.
When that happens, you won't be happy anymore and you will go on Twitter complaining that your government is turning fascist in a hurry and ask how nobody did anything to stop this.
But you probably think that it's never going to happen because you are one of the good people, not the scum of the earth that dares watching Tiktok.
Don't worry, nobody would stop it anyway, at least nobody on Twitter and Tiktok. The Kremlin is paying the nazis to scream, shout and create diversions. Then they could justify other de-nazifying invasions. The only ones rallying now are the nazis, screaming and shouting, oh no, cancelled elections.
How convenient.
This is the same argument as for encryption. You can't have encryption only for the good guys and not for the criminals. You either have encryption that protects everyone including criminals or you have no encryption.
In this case, you can't have free speech while advocating for censorship against what you consider to be propaganda.
Either everyone has the right to express themselves, including pro war lunatics or you right to free speech will eventually go extinct because then it's only a matter of time before someone else will use the same argument to start censoring a topic or an idea that you care about and they will do it the with the same zeal as you when you agreed to censor RT.
Yet despite this fact that has been proven time and time again, here we are in 2025 with people like you who applaud censorship.
[Editing this while I still can as although I think it's a reasonable discussion I tend to regret getting too much into politics here.]
It's like handing knives out on a playground. rt.com is handing out propaganda which is meant to influence those who are already distrustful of mainstream institutions.
Surely it will stop at blocking them (the Bad Guys), it will never extend to blocking us (the Good Guys). What a naive way of thinking.
Which German laws did RT break?
Propaganda usually isn't banned, except in specific cases (defamation, hate speech, etc...). But AFAIK, RT is not special in that regard, it is just the kind of content one would expect from a website openly affiliated with Russian authorities.
Pretty sure the biggest propaganda channel is social media and it's wide open.
I would be in favor of limiting these channels, because I agree with you it seems necessary. But it’s also something to be quite careful with, I feel.
I think the current shift in acceptance of blocking social media for children is a start and allows us to consider it’s positive and negative effects.
You see, he isn't against propaganda, he is against propaganda he doesn't agree with.
I’m against propaganda that seeks to actively undermine freedom and democracy in my country and the rest of the EU. Is that so strange?
There is abundant factual evidence that the US worked to undermine democracy in Ukraine in 2014 when Ukraine elected a candidate favourable to Moscow. It's not propaganda to draw attention to that.
As a Ukrainian, this statement of yours is complete and utter bullshit.
Where did you heard it?
It is not only factually incorrect, every point is just completely wrong: no favorable candidate to Moscow was elected in 2014, US did not worked to undermine democracy and there is absolutely zero evidence of both of these things happened.
This is what RT and other propaganda networks is dangerous, it creates a fake reality which people believe in. Then you act on this knowledge as if it is real.
No, it's not. Social media is massively censored in many EU countries (and UK).
Not OP, but there is strong censorship. The previous government sent a police brigade to a random dud that said something like “he is a clown” or similar (don’t remember the details). In Germany you have to be extremely careful with what you say, and how you say it, because you can be in jail faster than you think.
There are people who see that as positive, because are used to be extremely careful and conscious of their words. But is a very thin line, where one word can obliterate your life as you know it.
Please post a source
Here one: translation you can do at leisure. Also there is a sister comment with a similar case. I have a family memver that was also persecuted for hanging a flag saying “the park is for the children “ as they wanted to construct in a park.
There are literally thousands of cases constantly of different severity, but freedom looks different to me. https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/habeck-beleidigu...
"Demnach soll er im Frühjahr 2024 auf X eine Bilddatei mit Bezug zur Nazi-Zeit hochgeladen haben, die möglicherweise den Straftatbestand der Volksverhetzung erfüllen könnte."
The police was sent when he wrote “schwachkopf”. Not before. The association with nazi came much later, and had a pretty good explanation. If you look the coments that guy wrote was CRISTAL CLEAR he was not nazi, and much less antisemitic. Was a clear case of using a law for what it was not intended.
In 2021, Andreas Grote, the minister of interior of the Germany city-state Hamburg was called a dick in a tweet. (Andy, you are such a dick). This led to a police search of the home of the Twitter account owner [1].
This sparked a discussion about how to handle hate spech, as for regular people being called a dick does not result in a 06:00 am. police raid with six officers.
In the aftermath, a mural in a left wing culture center has been painted over multiple times with the tweet and a call for his resignation [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g...
[1] https://archive.is/hETjp
[2] https://images.welt.de/67dd7b08559c903aae8287ac/12efd9779a84...
Being called a dick on social media is now hate speech? I thought it was constructive criticism.
In an ideal society there would be no need to block propaganda.
Still concerning that there is a Ministry of Truth.
The good solution would be the educate the population about critical thinking, and to use their brain when they see information.
If you just censor things, you hide the real problems, and end up with dumb people without critical judgment (or no access to information).
They do educate people to do that already. But the power of narrative is much stronger than the motivation to do the actual work of checking your sources.
It’s very easy to convince anyone to support your cause. Just tell them they are the real victims, that they have been deprived of their rightful privilege, and that it is someone else’s fault. Give them undue credit, take away their inconvenient responsibilities. I promise you, they will have zero motivation to uncover your lies.
We have a collective responsibility to protect the truth - the actual, messy, complicated, real-life truth.
Exactly. That isn't going to help the argument whatsoever. Blocking stuff without legal basis is an entirely different ballpark from legally mandated blocks after due process and the option for legal challenges.
It’s a cycle.
The Russian propaganda spends a lot of resources on reinforcing high-minded ideals that provide a scaffolding for the intellectual types to climb on. The suckers and idiots fall for the more odious stuff.
Is Chris Hedges a Russian propagandist?
That is a retarded justification.
It’s incredibly valuable to understand how the enemy thinks.
Interesting...so facts are just whatever comes pre-approved by your worldview? Handy system!
I must ask sincerely: do you know of concrete instances where RT has been shown to claim things that are objectively untrue, that they reasonably ought to have known were untrue? Or is this just about them using the same techniques (selective reporting / emphasis on stories salient to particular worldviews, editorialization etc.) that everyone else uses?
For that matter, in most cases where RT has been linked to me, I couldn't see any clear way that the story advanced Russian interests, except perhaps by trying to paint the USA as full of internal social and cultural conflicts. But, frankly, American media does a pretty good job of that, too. (And many of those media outlets have also grossly misrepresented many events relevant to those conflicts — including ones where I know very well that they were misrepresented because I witnessed them first-hand. For example, I watched the Rittenhouse trial live-streamed, and then read media coverage describing something barely recognizable as what I just saw.)
(Besides, it's not like they're trying to hide that "rt" stands for Russia Today.)
Who cares. Just make it go away, there's too much noise already. I for one don't care about the arguments of some "news outlet" paid for by the ones who attacked Ukraine. The Global Times isn't banned because the CCP is outlining issues using restraint.
Yes?
> Are you seriously crying about the biggest Russian propaganda channel being blocked
The decision to classify something as propaganda should never be the role of a government, much less blocking it.
But that's something that's close to impossible for continental European cultures to ever understand, at a gut level.
Can't take the "propaganda" and "misinformation" excuses seriously when the German establishment media has been blatantly lying to their teeth about an ongoing genocide, and smearing anyone who stood for an obvious moral cause with 0 repercussion. They make the Israeli far-right newspapers blush.
I feel like someone junior tried to hide their oopsies and did this in an unprofessional manner like all juniors are bound to do at some point (like youtube killing IE6).
Ethics aside, how is what the engineer did "unprofessional"?
It's really getting to be past time to migrate things off of the DNS.
Oh, you can be sure any new protocol approved by the IETF today is only going to reflect the needs and use cases of large corporations (see HTTP/3). We gotta work with what we have.
Why would you ask the IETF?
In Germany the citizens must change their DNS to block the German government control of their lives. Too many bad laws to keep giving them your consent to be governed.
> In Germany the citizens must change their DNS to block the German government control of their lives.
It's not the government directly, but what is called in German "Flucht ins Privatrecht" [escape into private law], meaning that the government "outsources" such activities to private organizations that are only very indirectly charged by the government (implying that you cannot use public law to sue the government, but you have to sue the respective organization indirectly. Also, since the relationship between the government and the respective organization is very indirect, the politicians can claim that they are not responsible for the organization's wrongdoings - something that is often not easy to disproof).
It’s explicitly not the government, it’s an independent private association of ISPs and copyright holders.
The blocks wouldn't exist without the government.
From https://cuii.info/en/about-us/
The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
The article was about how they are deciding to block websites on their own authority, without court orders.
The article is speculating on why a test domain owned by Telefonica is blocked. The government issues many blocking orders and the CUII complies.
We really need an alternative to DNS.
Oh, please, downvote away. But there is GNU Name System and Freenet, but are they any good?
Europe and Germany in particular took from the 30s-40s the lesson where freedom of expression is a risk in democracies because a demagogue can easily sway opinions. For that reason they are in a better position to protect themselves against the 21st century threat to democracy of foreign influences networks
No thanks. I’d rather form my own opinions.
>the “demagogue” who allows free expression is more of a tyrant than a state who blocks wrongthink
Okay
Yet even if you were never manipulated by false information or narratives in your life, if you live in the US you live in a country where pizzagate happened, the capital riots, the george floyd protests which also became very violent at times and other events where the russian IRA had a hand
"We need more government action and control to protect you from le bad people" does not in fact strike me as the opposite of what happened in Nazi Germany.
Yet, free speech and democracy was exploited by a group that aimed at dismantling free speech and democracy (among many other things)
So, to prevent that from happening, we ought to dismantle free speech and democracy?
Only if you think in absolute ones and zeros
You can prevent organizations whose aim is to destroy democracy by exercising some restrictions on democracy without completely dismantling free speech and democracy.
just as for example you may jail someone and completely restrict their freedom in order to protect others, without completely dismantling democracy
Except in this case everyone is being jailed, to keep them safe from the criminal.
It's what kept the Nazis from rising again in Germany for 80 years.
Guy goes to the psychiatrist, he keeps clapping his hands. Explains that this is to keep away the elephants. Doctor goes "But there aren't any elephants around?" Guy replies "See? It's working!"
(I'm sure there's a more sophisticated way to refer to this fallacy, but my point stands.)
Not only most of europe was overtaken by fascism in the thirties, currently you have democracies that were taken over by authoritarians such as Russia, Turkey and Venezuela.
So it appears to me there are still elephants around
So if Russia, Turkey and Venezuela had stronger governments, they wouldn't be authoritarian?
Yes, if by stronger governments you mean stronger democratic institutions that could have fought populism, that would have helped.
Democratic countries that are corrupt, weak and have poor cultural defense mechanisms against populism fail. In Germany such a mechanism is the one discussed in this thread, in the US it's a strong , almost religious belief in the constitution
The progress of censorship in every single Western country is an admission that "democracy" is a fallacy born from an exceptional small period of time of civil peace, economic growth and wealth. Countries can only follow a stable political path - good or bad, this is not the point - if they have an authoritarian regime.
Communism did not work because it was not communist enough, now democracy is not working because it's not democratic enough. Democracy is the golden calf of westerners. I truly believe that voting rights are hurting more a society than drugs and alcohol.
A crucial component of democracy is free and accurate media. Every single functioning democracy in the world has institutions that can apply some amount of sanctions against newspapers and other media that do no live up to the expectation of accuracy.
They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age, but that doesn’t mean it’s not reasonable or important. Blocking propaganda posing as “news” is a stopgap measure, but we can’t do nothing if we want democracy to work.
Democracy immediately stops existing when elites start to prevent people of "wrongthink". Democracy is just another authoritarian system with a big downside: nobody is accountable of failures. There is no king, no chief to dethrone. Another friend of the temporary suzerain will be placed in power for a couple of years.
> A crucial component of democracy is free and accurate media.
What does "accurate media" mean?
The fact is, there strictly isn't and strictly never was any such thing.
In fact, it is absolutely impossible to attain something like this.
The moment something gets transcribed, it ceases to be objective and therefore, there never isnt any such thing as "accurate" news.
Any student of history learns this in their first semester.
> They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age
LOL, it was far, far worse before the information age.
True, there was far fewer "official" versions of what actually goes on in the world, but it doesn't mean they were in any way accurate or any less manipulative.
All it takes to check that is to hop from one so-called "free country" to another an compare two mainstream newspapers describing the same event.
The only way you can get a bit close to the actual truth of what's happening is by reading all the opinions, especially the diametrically opposed ones and try to form your own.
You can read entire twitter threads today completely composed in Russia, where the trolls write both sides
That has never happened with newspapers. Today's many people entire window to reality is through the internet and like it or not, people believe what's popular or if not, can believe an opinion is popular if it's widespread online.
It's very easy to create racial tensions for example that way, as was done by the russians
When exactly was there “free and accurate” media? Did you mistake the restrictions on some 20th century broadcast media that originated as a consequence of government licensing as some sort of centuries-old universal truth prior to social media? If anything newspapers in particular used to be much more irresponsible and scandalous, certainly as bad as anything on Twitter. And yes, there was plenty of foreign influence operations as well.