https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

Wikipedia cites this term being coined in 1988 ;).

If it's left-wingers, it'll be hate speech and "think of the women/minorities".

Same outcome, of course.

Whether Democrats are they are hardly left wing, and somebody who would found PMRC even less so...

There is, evidently, a fairly powerful and far-reaching population of left-leaning people who believe and are willing to act on the idea that the internet should be politically controlled. I've never heard of this being done successfully against, say, a communist website.

[1]https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/18/cloudflare_ceo_rubb...

Yes, there has been some violence from the anti-fascist side, such as Eric Clanton being hit with a bicycle lock. But you are overlooking the fact that fight-wing activists have initiated more and more deadly violence in similar contexts: a stabbing at a rally in Sacramento last year; a shooting Washington state earlier this year; and of course the deliberate driving of a car into a crowd at Charlotteville a couple of weeks ago. Screenshots from Discord suggest that particular tactic was discussed in advance by RW activists.

I don't want to go on a Gish gallop or we'd be here all day, but I'd also encourage you to reflect on the fact that while Antifa supporters endorse the idea of punching nazis, popular figures with a public following on the far right have publicly and formally expressed the desire for civil war and even genocide. It's not possible to have a reasonable discussion without addressing that dichotomy.

Also: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/12/german-police-...

Took me 2 seconds to find that. Your lack of knowledge isn't proof of something not existing.

Where Antifa discharging firearms at peaceful protesters? Or was that the neo-nazis?

I have nothing more to say to you.

I'm also not defending Antifa, I'm commenting on your equivalence between the two groups. Sure, in the broadest of strokes they are the same, but so are all criminals. But one would not say a shoplifter is the same as a murderer.

> I seriously don't get how you can ham on the murderers but defend shoplifters, they're both fringe groups that shit over society's rules.

It wasn't the GOVERNMENT that did this. That's the only thing that freedom of speech laws give you freedom from.

And, those sites weren't suppressed because they impacted politics; they were suppressed because they impacted profitability.

It's almost like the right needs some sort of "neutrality" laws that guarantee that internet websites and internet traffic they need can't be restricted.

I'm pretty far left in my politics, and I find the idea that these websites got kicked off quite worrying. However, I also find the centralization of internet services quite worrying.

I'm still old school enough that I run my own servers for exactly this reason.

I agree censorship of political content on private infrastructure is (and should be) legal; I also believe it's plainly immoral and should alarm people. I also believe that, given that the public DNS is government-controlled, it nominally belongs to the public and private entities like cloudflare should not be gatekeepers to it.

Of course, the best solution is for everyone to switch to some sort of crypto-based truly public DNS system like Namecoin, but that's not happening for a while.

I get my only news about US politics from HN, so I genuinely have no idea.

Wikileaks has been immorally persecuted in many ways, but direct censorship is not one of them.

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/07/21/richard-...

When something happens, the media gives right-wing fascists the benefit of the doubt; "we don't know who he is", "he doesn't represent the movement", "he was scared", "he was attacked", "he's crazy", and once the proof is out they tend to draw false equivalencies with left.

That doesn't happen as much on the left - it's stigmatized full stop, no excuses. CNN's clickbait news will drag it out

Does it though? Because I found the majority of the media except niche-oriented ones like FOX and Breibart do not fit that profile.

CNN had no problems attacking with everything they knew, but they avoided excess speculation and treated the Charlottesville attacker the same as Hodgkinson... which was my point.

They bind our hands and tape our mouths all under the guise of protecting us.

So making phones more traceable doesn't really work against terrorists, when there are so many incompetent people watching us :(

Would you elaborate more on the background of this? Were the SIM cards sold and registered with a private company? I would suspect it is (or they were, if more than one). Which national defense agencies are you referring to? Did the national defense agencies search these records? Do you assume the agencies have access to this information by default? If it's through a private company, should the agencies have access by default? Do you think the private companies should have contacted the agencies if they didn't have access?

There are answers to these questions, some of them factual, some of them ethical or legal, and up for debate. In only a few situations I think it would be fair to call the agencies "so dumb". What leads you to use those words?

https://english.atlatszo.hu/2016/11/08/illegal-trade-of-burn...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/deutsche-...

In the communications act there was a provision about suspicious registrations reporting requirement.

The big providers (like Telekom, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telecom) have a well established working relationship with the defense agencies (they are called national security services, there are a few of them in Hungary, some are focusing on Internal Affairs (counter intelligence), some are on conspiracies, etc.

Expecting perfection out of the gate--or even at any given time--is setting someone up for failure. If this is something you care about, what you can focus on is that they're making changes to improve the situation: they're actively responding to correcting and preventing these kinds of mistakes in the future. Unless they're omniscient and omnipotent, it's really all they can do. This applies to work in general, not just security.

Eventually they'll fix this "security hole", but they won't magically become hyper-competent :/

People likely won't resist it too much. We've had this identification requirement imposed upon us in the Netherlands a few years ago, and while there is valid criticism on this requirement, it passed. So to vote now you need to bring a valid ID. If the British government wants to do this with a minimum of fuss, they'll do what our government did and make the driver's licence a valid identity card. That way the majority of adults will already have their ID on them as a matter of habit (and won't complain).

Of course mentioning that it is needed to prevent Muslim voters from committing voting fraud (see¹…) will help push the bill trough.

1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/27/voters-will-have-...

Only an extraordinarily confident and popular government would have another go (and it's not what the UK has now).

As for the voting scheme you describe, it's entirely voluntary, for 2018, and no council has signed up yet.

Things may move in that direction slowly, but to suggest that the UK is particularly close to requiring ID for internet accounts is downright silly I'm afraid.

Of course, most people tell their friends which way they voted, but that's their choice.

However? Don't you mean, "as an added benefit"?

No amount of decentralized web will help if ID is legally required to post things. Torrenting, encryption, and similar will simply be made illegal, since that's required for enforcement. Many of the established lobbies would support that, for the usual justifications.

You can only fix this by not letting the law start on this crazy slippery slope.

Without centralised gatekeepers, the only viable way to censor the internet is to enforce laws on end-users, which is a daunting task for any government.

And technologically, at least two of the necessary elements for a global meshnet are here: protocols for decentralized addressing and routing, like cjdns >1, and protocols for peer-to-peer electronic value transfer between nodes, like Raiden >2. The only major missing piece of the technological puzzle, AFAICS, is a technology for cheaply deploying telecommunication backbone links.

>1 https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/doc/Whitepape...

>2 https://github.com/raiden-network/raiden/blob/master/README....

DISCLAIMER: I am by no means a bonafide cryptopunk. I have contributed very little code and other meaningful technical work to privacy tech projects.

Especially with the way we are moving. Most people today are happy to use sso with services like facebook or google. Most people also have their real identify tied to their core profile they use to sign on to other services. The abstraction between the internet and the cloud is becoming more blurry to a internetizen that is technologically ignorant.

Practically the only way of connecting anonymously to the Internet is the old-fashioned wardriving, or getting lucky and finding a "free wifi" which is not limited to the Web only.