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Thanks for this timely reminder - I was nearly back off down the TfT rabbit hole again!


Not so. I would have guessed it was either Feb,Mar,Apr (astronomical) or Mar, Apr, May being the gardeners calendar. But Q2 is Q2. It's not just having to flip the season for the hemisphere.


Quite so, even if a regional dialect. Certainly where Caterpillar operates out of it is common. If we were instead talking about an Australian company that produces barbies then we'd know we're talking about barbecues and not dolls, even where regional dialect only knows Barbie as a doll. Words don't exist in a vacuum. Context is significant.


My apologies. Might I ask a question, please? How do we otherwise stop the internet being hacked to support these vile creatures?


I'm concerned that "censorship of bad views" leads to radicalisation. e.g. if you have concerns that are morally unacceptable to express, the only place you can express those concerns are in morally unacceptable areas.

I think the hope of censoring bad views is to increase that friction before people get there; make it harder for 'ordinary' people to stumble across vile sites, and reduce access to vile sites to those determined to get it.

I'm concerned that having a hammer of "censorship makes this problem goes away" makes it easier to see other social problems as nails. One line to draw is "censor speech which directly incites or leads to violence". It seems the line NZ is drawing (and ISPs preemptively drew) is "objectionable" or "injurious to the public good". That seems much easier to abuse.


We have abundant evidence that not censoring bad views also leads to radicalisation. So your argument is weak.


I’m really interested in that. Do you have links to any studies or other sources?


Wouldn't that put them on even ground essentially but one option has far less collateral damage? The burden of proof is usually on the one proposing a change.


I think blocking 4chan and 8chan means their users will resent the establishment even more. Considering this is the demographic whose resentment was influential enough to play a role in the election of Trump in the US, I think society needs to think twice before stamping the boot into their face.

I know some people who will feel that blocking these sites was an affront to their identity. And like it or not, the number of people who feel this way is not small, and their influence even less small. You can't just stamp them out, and you're radicalising them further.


After Reddit kicked out CoonTown and some of the other hate subs a few years ago, hateful content all over Reddit dropped. A few people went all huffy-puffy and started this Voat thing, but most just stayed on Reddit and ... stopped posting hateful crap.

So ... it does work. People don't radicalize on their own, they do so in a community, and they behave according to standards in the community. Sites like 4chan and 8chan are especially deceptive since it's a mix of people (not just white supremacists) who will slowly radicalize (part of) the general population there.

This makes it different from StormFront and all the explicit neo-Nazi websites. You don't go to StormFront to post memes fur teh lulz, only to get slowly drawn in to a white supremacist world.


No, those people very much need a boot stamped into their face (metaphorically). The vast majority are cowards who hide behind anonymity or in their sick community. Catch a few and make an example of them and the vast majority will back off. I'm talking about NZ here, I understand the situation in the USA is different and worse.

In fact, though, they won't be cut off. 4chan and 8chan are both accessible to me here in NZ with no tricks.


I think it's DNS blocking with the ISP-provided DNS servers. Perhaps you're using google public DNS already?

In Australia I believe it was blocking at the IP address level, so requires a VPN to circumvent. But only for some ISPs.


The problem is people stumbling on literal neo-Nazi propaganda on random YouTube videos and the like (which is not hard to do right now). I don't care about neo-Nazis sharing neo-Nazi content among themselves, these people are too far gone, I care about neo-Nazis recruiting.

As for your "sliding slope" argument, literally no one is confused about the difference between literal neo-Nazis who rant about (((replacement))) and everyone else. The entire point just isn't relevant. It's a red herring. It's like "they'll ban cars next!" when discussing speed limits. No one is confused about the difference between speed limits and banning cars, either. It's just not what's being discussed.


I don't know what you mean by hacked, but this would have been less of an issue if New Zealand had not tried to censor it. The Streisand effect is very real. If you're looking for a technical solution, there is none. The most valuable feature of the Internet is its resistance to censorship. Cut off one head, and two more shall take its place.


Streisand effect doesn't apply here. It's about relatively small thing being blown up by a disproportionate reply.

This isn't some small event, everyone already knows about it.


Hacked, in this case would mean that the violence was designed to drive traffic towards the manifesto, which would have otherwise vanished into obscurity. But I take your point regarding censorship.


How do we stop the roads from allowing those vile creatures to walk on them?

There are many possible solutions, but each of them invites a further question: "is it worth it?"


There is free speech, and then there is sensible. In NZ we don't use the perpetrators name and we don't want you looking at his messages. Get over it!


From the article: "Let’s be clear, each and every one of the blocked websites operates lawfully – that includes removing illegal material when requested."

So being 'sensible' means conceding censorship to corporations, without involving the legal system?


The hole in information caused by the censorship is causing people to come up with and perpetuate all sorts of crazy accusations and conspiracies about what "really" happened or why. The truth and fact of the what (video) and why (manifesto) is important clarification to the situation. Censorship is causing mystery, unrest, and false blame.


There is no mystery whatsoever.

The video is footage of someone murdering people, and the manifesto is a mess right wing islamophobia and strange call-outs.

Both are offensive both at a basic human level, and under the legal definition here in NZ.

There's no information hole - the contents of the video and the manifesto have been very widely reported.

What do you really expect to learn that you can't already learn from the reporting?


> and the manifesto is a mess right wing islamophobia

Except it's not - it's a mess of a "third position" white ethnonationalism.

And I know it because I could read it.


>we don't want you looking at his messages. Get over it!

Do you realize how authoritarian you sound?


Yes. I know!. It's been a bad week.


There will always be a bad week, a tragedy, a heinous crime, an 'attack on your way of life' - that is when you must fight for your freedoms the hardest, because that is when they will be taken if you don't.


Well, we could just turn the entire internet off, then the messages would surely be hidden.

Archive.is has a lot more than one page.


You joke, but I'm convinced our police and government know even less about technology than in Australia where they tried to ban encryption.


Well that would be silly.


the point is, you have to draw a line somewhere, and if the line is "nobody can see anything this guy wrote" then the collateral damage is going to be perhaps just too much.

When I said Archive.is has more than one page, I meant we're blocking millions of non-offending pages for the sake of blocking one that offends.

So, how far will we go? Block Archive.is? Block Facebook? The whole internet?


This level of heavy handedness was unprecedented in the west, and is more characteristic of China than anything else.


[flagged]


He has no name! Not now.


Space flight. Sigh!


Never drive an emergency to the hospital. Always call an ambulance.


That seems silly. I am a 3 minute drive to the ER. Vs a 3 minute drive for an ambulance here, then a 3 minute drive back.


You have to change who you are, then you will move towards the equilibrium weight of that new person.


Where there's muck, there's brass.


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