We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I foresee business opportunities in proxy servers/geolocation spoofing The dismal forces are indeed massing as I predicted. That well documented fountain of fraudulent claims the NSPCC and all the usual dismal censors, from assorted statists of the nominal right like Sajid Javid, to the usual leftists are indeed starting to metastasise into another effort to control the internet. For the children of course.
We need products than make proxy servers and geolocation spoofing default-easy for the 95 IQ user, something people just use because it is cheap and largely invisible… with end to end encryption and all those other things that states hate integrated in at the lowest level possible.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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If the Sajid Javid is the one I’m a thinking of he is a cunt. Sorry to be so bald (though not as bald as him) but he is a cunt. Am I unique in thinking some of our “moderate” Muslim campaigners are simply trojan horses, chaff (in the air-combat sense) or useful idiots for AQ, ISIS, Boko and all the rest.
Living in Malaysia I suffer from this quite a bit.
So I installed the Hola Internet plug in for Chrome and the problem goes away.
Best of all, I can choose which country to spoof for each website, so some, like the BBC I spoof as coming from the UK, others like YouTube I spoof as coming from the USA (i.e. less content restrictions) and others I spoof as coming from Japan (i.e. the Japanese are weird anyway, so who would be surprised about Japanese viewers).
It’s not ideal, but it puts a layer of misdirection between myself and the website.
https://hola.org/?utm_source=holaext
Being forced to give your e-mail to register?
Worry no longer with Guerilla Mail which is a completely throwaway e-mail account and only lasts long enough to receive that acknowledgement e-mail to be able to login to your spam-obsessed website.
https://www.guerrillamail.com/
I get a connection failure at site when I try Hola.org sadly but it looks interesting from what you are saying
Waste of time I’m afraid, Perry, ultimately your internet connection starts with a physical line to the ISP gateway, once that is compromised, nothing you run will be anonymous, every byte is sent down that line, and encryption only slows the intervention and the ISP is in full control over the domains you visit.
Parental control software is easy, cheap (often free) and a lot is built into the OS. Rather than get low-IQ products to circumvent the anti-libertarian rules, which makes individualists look like some sort of naughty rebel, it would be better promoting low-IQ parental control software to show these the statists that individuals are perfectly capable of managing their own self after all, which would be a moral victory as well.
I found this one the other day, it is really comprehensive but the interface is somewhat clunky, a better design would be a huge advance for privacy and the individual and a snub in the face for these busybodies.
https://sites.google.com/site/goppieinc/pc-screen-watcher
Hola is only spoofing the website you connect to, it is not anonymising anything.
Which is fine if they are trying to age check because they detect you are in the UK
Perry, that is a website decision, why would a foreign website put an age check on UK only visitors?
Did you read the article? Because UKgov would threaten to make UK ISPs block them if they do not age check people coming in from the UK. ie UK paying customers if it is a pay site
Ultimately, it is local governments enforcing restrictions on local internet users via local internet service providers (e.g. UK Gov saying to BT “Block access to PirateBay.se”)
VPN’s are able to bypass this by servicing encrypted traffic to another location and from there to the desired server.
Since the block is at the ISP level (usually), the use of VPN’s and geo-location services is to bypass the blockage. Such a service MIGHT also provide some level of anonymity.
As the blocks introduced are related to specific websites, I can tailor my use of HOLA to just those websites which would be otherwise blocked.
An ISP could also treat the government with contempt by using a DNS only block, which can be bypassed by using an open DNS such as Google’s (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4)
All such attempts are likely to be futile as you just end up in an arms race between government imposed censorship and those like us who refuse to be censored.
The idiots in power haven’t the wit to create an internet censorship regime that would actually work (thank god), so at most this will inconvenience the majority and will be bypassed by the tech-savvy.
‘Impartial’ is not a word that springs to mind when reading the BBC’s coverage of this issue.
Me too.
“The add-on could not be downloaded due to a connection failure on hola.org”
There’s a conversation on this going on over at Tim Worstall’s. A persuasive argument’s blocking’s only the first stage in a more ambitious plan. Once the sites are blocked evading the interdiction & downloading the material anyway puts the downloader in possession of blocked material. Enter Plod, seizing machines to ascertain whether said material contravenes…well it doesn’t really matter, does it? The process being the first stage of punishment & all.
If you think about it, there’s nothing whatsoever to stop you downloading kiddiepr0n. Few minor snags & difficulties to circumvent. But would you? Risk having it on your hard-drive in today’s climate? We’ve seen what happens to those who’re tempted.
But there is the thing isn’t it? It starts with the reasonable – indeed to some extent the indefensible.
However, all too rapidly it becomes things that are in the commercial interests of special lobby groups such as the BBC and then TV studios deciding that even though the latest Game of Thrones appeared on TV in the USA yesterday, British audiences will have to wait until next year to see it.
What about WikiLeeks? Lets block access to that because it holds UK state secrets.
At what point does it cease becoming reasonable?
Because I think I’d prefer to be own arbiter of what I am allowed to know or view rather than some bureaucrat with an agenda and possibly a nice executive directorship to add to his huge pension and knighthood.
We need more regulations because kids are being corrupted by online porn sites, do we? Just how many times can the control freaks sell the public this particular horse?
I remember in the mid-80s, when video recorders were becoming widespread, the usual suspects whipped-up a moral panic about violent, explicit, “video nasties”. When given a list of video nasties, about a third of eleven year olds admitted to having watched them, including the titles that did not actually exist. The UK still got the Video Recordings Act, though.
What 11-year old didn’t watch “I Spit on your grave!” (excellent acting by the way) or the soul rending horror of “The Grifter”?
Whats wrong with Tor, perfectly usable. And I2P is coming on well also.
It’s not a matter of being anonymous, it’s a matter of providing a mapping between the IP that a server sees and your physical location.
I can set up a vpn end point on an amazon instance, and you can connect to it. Your ISP will see an encrypted bit-stream to one of Amazon’s cloud servers. Depending on how “we” set up the key exchange they might be able to establish a MTM and expose all your traffic, but doing that for every customer?
Once the VPN is up your traffic will look like it’s coming from that Amazon instance, your DNS requests will (usually) be what the VPN DHCP server hands you etc. You set a couple of these up around the world and you can get around a LOT of restrictions.
When I lived in Australia a co-worker had a VPN endpoint in NYC that he’d use to get American Only content.
Nothing is wrong with Tor, but this is about horses for courses.
If I am in genuine fear of state observation, such as filing reports of crimes committed by Iran to Amnesty from within Iran, then sure, Tor is exactly what I’d use.
But the reality is that most interference we are talking about here is either nanny-state decided what I may-or-may-not read or watch. Where I live in Penang, Malaysia sites blocked by the government come up with the message:
But there aren’t that many of them and the use of CloudFlare seems to stop some of the IP address blocks from working at all on the larger sites.
No, the biggest issue that I suffer from is geographic blocks instituted by content providers to region protect their content. I mean WTF is this 1973?