cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36863320
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Viber, WeTalk, TikTok, Nimbuzz, and Poppo Live are already registered.
Similarly, Telegram and Global Diary are in the process of registration.
Social media platforms to be blocked:
- Facebook Messenger
- YouTube
- X (formerly Twitter)
- Snapchat
- Discord
- Signal
- Threads
- Quora
- Tumblr
- Clubhouse
- Mastodon
- Rumble
- MeWe
- VK
- Line
- IMO
- Zalo
- Soul
- Hamro Patro
Other Sources
OK so three things:
- How are they going to ban Mastodon. Like they cannot ban every mastodon instance.
- From what I know about people in regimes like this: VPN usage is basically normal because of things like this. I live in the UK and I’m using a VPN.
- Hamro Patro, if you don’t know, is the Nepali “everything” app. It’s officially a calendar app, but it also does News, Horoscopes (something that’s important to Nepalis I guess), Exchange Rates, Radio and Podcasts. It is one of the most popular apps in the country and the most popular Nepali developed app period. This is like if the US banned the CNN app or if the British Government banned the Sky News app.
Modern laws rarely if ever have anything to do with what they claim to be changing. Just figure out where the graft is flowing and that’s your answer. There’s no graft to be had with mastodon because nobody is making any money there so at first it’s simply ignored unless it annoys someone in Nepal’s government. If an instance suddenly started getting popular and making money in Nepal then it gets on their radar and they have to start paying bribes to continue operating just like the big guys, and there will be no room at all for a ‘medium guy’ who makes a little profit but not enough to comply with the requirements of corruption.
It doesn’t need to make money, it just needs to be a “Problem”.
A number of these sites try hard to Filter out VPN users.
They only implement DNS blocking so you have to change your DNS and everything will work again — this is also the case with their ban on porn sites. It’s just an inconvenience to the citizens, all because they aren’t competent enough to manage “criminal activites”.
I wish them luck banning Mastodon, Lemmy, and Nostr… Oh wait, they cant
Its totaly easy:
- Ban the apps
- Block major instances
- Jail some instance admins who doesn’t shut down (and make a show out of it)
No, you will not get the hobby revolutionary this way who really wants to “fight the man”, but you surely will scare away the nepalese version of the average joe and with this effectively killing the networks there for main stream adoption.
Are there any instance administrators in Nepal to jail?
Well… we will see
Not familiar with the other examples, but Lemmy doesn’t need an app. Can get to it via browser. Maybe the others need one?
Websites you can block via DNS - yes, i know that this can also be fairly easy circumvented - but the folks who know this are NOT the target audience for state action like that.
Oh, yeah I know that sites can be blocked easily enough. My comment was more about whether specific apps are needed. For example, I rarely put apps for specific websites on my phone and instead just use the browser. Cuts way down on ads and other bullshit.
I am curious how they are planning to ban Mastodon. I am assuming they are going to block say the top 25 instances?
Hate to say it but it honestly doesn’t sound crazy hard to just block any instance that pops up. Yes it’s whack a mole but if it’s an automated script, it can just crawl through a backdoor instance and ban any domain it sees.
Yeah that’s a solved problem. Iran, Russia, China and other countries have gone through this “stages of denial” process years ago. It starts with “haha they are incompetent and can’t block everything” and 10 years later half the Internet is blocked and you have prison sentencing for accessing “illegal” information (for the flgood of the people of course). Anyone who claims that internet censorship is not possible is a naive person fortunate enough to live in a place where it’s not a thing.
“IT people/programmers are furry gay liberals” is a myth. There are plenty of bootlickers among them, like in any large enough group of people that’s not defined by a specific ideology/political affiliation.
As someone who is friends with many furry gay liberal IT dudes and dudettes.
I can’t name a single one that wouldn’t bend the knee the moment their job is threatened and their option is getting fired and risking their entire career or just being a good cog in the machine.
The people who bend the knee the fastest tend to be the ones most at risk of being abused by the powers that be should they not comply. It’s the very fundamental reason that revolutions tend to be so explosive. There’s a LONG build up of people not pushing against authority because of fear and security.
So till the breaking point where the gay furry liberals have no options and it’s death or do what their bosses tell them. You can full well expect them to work right along with the bootlickers. They just are going to bitch about it more in the break room then the bootlickers.
They will block all instances except the ones registered. They just want a point of contact for when there is illegal activity. Yes it becomes a problem if they make criticizing the government legal but it is a democracy for now.
Does a recursive DNS not get around all of this though? I’ve got to be missing something
Yeah that’s a solved problem. Ru
Blocking the domains connected to it is one way I can think of.
Because that works so well with the pirate bay. And with Mastodon or Lemmy, just having access to any one of the instances would enough.
And as we all know, that would not ban it entirely. They’d have to block every instance, every new instance that comes online, the main web page, the code repository, etc., to even have a hope of banning it.
There are sites dedicated to listing all federated lemmy instances. Knowing the FOSS nerds, surely there’s even an API already.
Some might slip, but very few large ones. That’s if the government cares about lemmy
The fact it’s interconnected makes it easy to just worm your way though banning everything.
Doesn’t matter if it’s all independently hosted. The greatest strength of the frediverse is the fact it’s federated.
That also it’s biggest fuck up point. These arent wholely independent forums.
And if the frediverse has to fully defederate everything to prevent itself from being scrubbed away. It defeats the entire fucking point.
Cause at that point just fucking go back to forums.
I think they best solution here is just easy to deploy proxies, it prevents banning by DNS or IP. More than that and they might as well just put the great firewall.
The problem is that if you can access one, you can access all of them. It doesn’t even matter how you access the one. Even if you access it over tor, as long as you can get to one instance, you’re in the Federation.
Mastodon’s main code repo is on GitHub, a government could just pressure MS to take down that repo, although that isn’t going to account for anyone self-hosting an instance and also hosting their own git repos outside of any of the major hosts.
In order to take down self-hosted instances, they’d have to raid people’s homes and take out their physical servers assuming they have physical servers in their place.
I’m betting GitHub is not the only place that the code repo is mirrored. Sure, it might be there, but something tells me it’s on a bunch of people’s computers as well, for people who work on it, or have just forked the repository. And there’s probably even copies of it on other mirrors, such as Code Bird, etc. in private repositories.
I don’t know when Microsoft would cave, but Nepal asking them to remove it probably isn’t going to that level. Maybe they geoblock but I can’t see them removing it for a everyone.
assuming they have physical servers in their place.
Nope, in that particular case they just have to hand over a strongly worded letter (and a small bribe) to the ISP.
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Well, if they start by blocking the clients, then block any webpage or server sending / receiving ActivityPub packets at the ISP level, they could possibly cut it off. Heck, just spin up a new Mastodon or Lemmy server, send out a ping, and have every Nepalese ISP & mobile provider block all domains and IPs that respond.
They’re still tor.
Signal:
Settings -> Privacy -> Advanced -> Censorship CircumventionSignal is a social media platform?
It’s in the “to be blocked” list posted.
I guess that centralized server thing is working out real well then. /s
Mastodon is also blocked, I don’t think they cared if services are centralized.
Do you think they will be blocking every single Mastodon server in existence?
If it’s federated it’s easy to block. If it’s not it’s too small to care about really.
And if you just remove the ability for federation to function in your country you have fundamentally broken the system making it basically unusable for your people.
The federvise is extremely weak to censorship for your avg joe because it’s strongest point the federation system is also it’s biggest Achilles heel.
With out federation it’s just a series of less useful forums and blogs.
The system is designed to prevent corporate ownership from destroying it. But the idea that you can prevent a government and those in control of the infrastructure from blocking it? Is laughable.
You can in small ways wrong around it but you don’t need 100% censorship to win the game of cat and mouse. Even 50% of the biggest instances wins you the game.
signal has stories now, so I’d say yes
Bah, more reason to avoid Signal. For private communications I want an antisocial network, not the opposite.
I think it’s a silly feature for a messaging app, but it has no impact on me if I ignore the feature.
I just use that for sharing memes with whoever sees it.
It does say something about the mindset of the vendor, which is a legit reason to decide not to use an app. From what I can tell, Teslas are pretty good cars despite some issues here and there. But Elon’s antics are enough to make me decide not to buy one.
I’m not sure adding a questionable social feature to a messaging app is reasonably comparable to the very long list of insane and/or evil shit Musk has done.
Like any messaging system, Signal’s utility is proportional to its userbase. If stories get more people to use it without making it worse for people who don’t care, then they’re a good idea even if I think everything else about the concept is bad.
A bar (place where you drink) is another type of a messaging system. You can meet people in them and have conversations there. That doesn’t mean it’s best to crowd everyone into one giant bar claiming that increases utility, compared with letting people freely open their own bars. Especially if the avowed purpose of the bar is enabling private conversations (giving you and your friend Bob a private place to talk, as opposed to creating a meeting place for strangers).
I can understand visiting a giant bar if I want to mingle with randos in public. If I want to talk privately with my friend, I want a small, private bar, preferably one whose existence is not known to anyone outside of my friend group. If the giant bar operator is going out of his way to prevent me from doing that, I have to say he is up to something not so good.
Sorry about the strained analogy but at least it didn’t mention cars. Well, until just now.
Use whatever software you want, more power to you, but I’m not totally convinced that “chaired by a fascist transphobic multibillionaire oligarch who actively subverts democracy at every opportunity” and “introduced a feature I don’t want to use into my free secure messaging app” are even close to equivocal?
I’m bothered mostly by the default Signal app’s inability to use a self-hosted server instead of signal.com’s own server. I’ve been skeptical towards Signal because of that. The social media feature is something I hadn’t heard of til just now. It reinforces my skepticism but it’s just another issue. Both tell me that Signal is out to somehow monetize (and maybe spy on) other people’s private relationships in a captive userbase, sort of like, you know, Marc Zuckerberg. I’d prefer to avoid dealing with people like that, especially where privacy apps are concerned.
I’d be more interested in Signal if I could use my own server without having to get people to install modified clients.
It’s completely removable with one setting. No nags or anti-patterns or design holes.
If it stops a few from sticking with whatsapp because signal lacks that “feature”, I’d say it’s worth it.eh, just dont use it. beats a lot of other alternatives at the moment
You can remove ot from your view and then you forget it is even a thing
Depends on how you want to look at it. They have “stories” which could most certainly be considered that.
None of the platforms allowed employs E2E encryption, does it?
Telegram allowed. It does not e2e encrypt by default. How will they make sure that option isn’t chosen by Nepalese?
All Nepal is asking for is registration so that there is a point of contact if there are any complaints. Telegram contacted Nepal after being banned.
Others didn’t respond and deliberately have no contact details online.
I tried to contact Reddit in Sydney about my ban but could only make them down to a multi-client large office building in Barangaroo.
This isn’t necessarily a bad move on Nepal’s part.
Nepal went full iron curtain. Hope the EU, US, and UK don’t get any ideas…
Bye Nepal, see you again after you line up all you tie-wearers against the wall
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Wao, Nepal is another part of the UK. Learning something new every day.
I’m not sure what the big deal is here. They’re dealing with a known rise in crime and fraud. this isn’t just a bogeyman “save the children” thing, it’s that they want to have access to the platform to keep things safe for their people and everyone else.
I think it’s more than reasonable to have a specific point of contact if there’s any issues related to a criminal investigation. And the lack of response from the Big Two is evidence that they don’t care.
Assocks. They don’t need (backend-level) access to the platform in order to fight that. They just have to do good, boots-on-the-ground detective work. In other words, earn their salaries. We don’t precime-inalize silverware companies because people may use kitchen knives to kill each other.
No, but if one brand of knife is used in the majority of a category of crimes, it’s fair that the government should have a clear point of contact with the manufacturer to help identify why it’s happening and how it can be prevented.
Realize this: The Nepalese government is being treated the same way as a “normal” person - they’re having trouble prosecuting these crimes because they’re not being given any access to hidden or deleted posts. They’re having to go though the useless fake support chats and the like. What they’re demanding, mostly, is that they have a known human being who will cooperate with the government and to whom they have a clear and unambiguous connection. Frankly speaking, I think that ought to be a bare-minimum for any company anywhere. I don’t support corporate sovereignty or corporate personhood. If you have a company operating in a nation, that nation should always have a clear point of contact for law enforcement & taxation purposes, as well as more general communication when needed.
… Long farting noise
