I won’t cheer on the hack or data leak because I think you’ll have well meaning people that are just frustrated caught up in the controversy, but I’m not overly sympathetic to anyone involved. I think it would be better if no one donated to polarizing causes, especially anything where people are asking for a democratically elected government to step down.

As for the company, it’s obvious they’re going to draw a ton of attention by using a controversial political event as a marketing tool. If they can’t even bother to secure their S3 buckets (unrelated to this) before ruffling a bunch of feathers, why should we feel bad for them? It’s not some innocent site that got hacked and had their business ruined. They’re trying to claim they’re a neutral platform, but there’s no such thing in politics. They’re taking a calculated risk by trying to benefit from the controversy and they got burned. Tough luck IMO.

The only true political neutrality if you’re running a platform is a total ban on everything political.

Add this to the list of how hard it is to break the Silicon Valley (and their political allies) hegemony.

Not only do you have AWS, App Store bans, email provider bans (mail chimp banned babylonbee for a while although claimed it was algorithmic), you also have to contend with building a product that is going to be attacked by hackers the second you are moderately successful.

The only fair player I can see in this is cloudflare, at least they have some sort of principle of being an infrastructure provider and not siding with a certain political side.

You sure about cloudflare?

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/17/cloudflare-ceo-calls-for-a...

I am aware of this one and I think it’s an interesting case. I think 99% of people wouldn’t have an issue with this and stormfront probably does have people actually breaking the law.

I also think it’s interesting how prince basically said - this is the ceo making a personal decision in the shower. That honesty was good, and at least it showed that prince was torn about it and admitted this is very hard and he will try and be an infrastructure provider in the future.

This is much better than the coordinated attack of a faceless bureaucracy of tech companies like with Parler

What I really hope is that we torn down 230 protection with these decisions. You stop providing service based on choice. You are fully responsible for everything else.

Make it fair free market to play. No more discrimination on anything. Only court orders to take down stuff.

You understand that you're arguing against the existence of moderated forums like HN, right?

Why do you believe that it should be made impractical for sites like HN to exist?

Small price to pay. Sometimes we have to accept some losses for freedom.

"Some losses". You're essentially advocating for ending all moderation on the internet. No more forums, no more IRC networks, no more facebook groups or subreddits either. I guess that'll also kill or heavily cripple much of multiplayer gaming.

I guess everybody needs to learn to be okay with spam too?

What's the big win here? You can already run your own censorship-free sites without forcing your shit down everybody elses throats. Turns out, most people don't want that.

Moderation of a public forum is censorship

Sure, why not? Who cares? People come to HN specifically because of the censorship.

Some censorship is good, some censorship isn't.

Across the span of time, all censorship is bad. If you live long enough, youll eventually find that your closest held beliefs might not be what you once thought they were.

I like this idea, but rather than applying to every website, it should only apply to ones so big that they've stolen the public square from us and replaced it with themselves (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit).

Aren’t donations to political causes required to be public record in the United States? Or, is that only for donations candidates but not to causes?

I also assume that the funding site is required to turn over this data to CSIS anyways, unless they actively ensure that only Canadians are being permitted to donate. Otherwise they risk being treated as an enemy of the Canadian state for ‘clandestine’ foreign interference in Canada’s interests, as keeping that list secret from CSIS while accepting foreign (non-Canadian) donations would exempt them from the political protest protections in the CSIS act, and expose themselves to risk of extradition to Canada.

Well, Canadian NGOs can legally receive donations globally. It's not a political party or a candidate, but an NGO.

e.g. would Americans donating to Amnesty International in Canada be considered an act of political interference? Seems like a stretch. People donate to charities of their choosing globally all the time, in fact, quite often to NGOs/charities that disagee with their local governments on quite a few things.

What is the CSIS act, and it's "political protest protections"? Seems really weird, you'd expect the fundamental right to protest in a democracy would be constitutionally enshrined, rather than "protected" under some law. This right is presumed, and the constitution simply recognizes its existence, but maybe in monarchies this is different, and rights are bestowed on the subjects by the monarch?

It seems to me, that if you need a law to "protect" the right to protest, you might be living in a country that isn't quite a democracy.

All democracies aren’t quite a democracy, by your logic, which is certainly accurate enough. All democracies must protect against foreign interference (PsyOps) in domestic politics and protests, and such protection runs directly counter to the right of non-violent dissidence; thus, by abrogating individual rights to any degree whatsoever through laws, tolerances, and actions, every country can be said not be “not quite a democracy” on a long enough timescale. However, the degree to which each democracy tolerates and shields nonviolent dissidence versus the interests of the country itself varies wildly per country, both in degree and substance.

Canada is no exception, encoding its protections of that intersection into the CSIS act. If you’d like to learn more about CSIS, these links are a good first step towards understanding how Canada’s laws govern foreign interference and how and when they protect domestic rights:

https://www.canada.ca/en/security-intelligence-service/corpo...

https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-23/

Pat King is one of the coordinators of this GiveSendGo campaign, per Google Cache.

Pat King is on record saying there is a plot to depopulate white people because they have the "strongest bloodline".

https://twitter.com/VestsCanada/status/1159997274900041729

Folks can be pedantic about him not being an actual Nazi, what without the snazzy uniform and all, but he is a white supremacist.

Not everybody throwing money at this campaign will be of the same mentality, but enough of them will be to warrant further investigation, and while that investigation should be more formal than this hacktivism, I shed zero tears at the thought of every dollar stripped from whatever goal this white supremacist has in mind.

If we were to look through a list of people who organized donations to BLM, and found some radical black separatists, would/should that have changed our opinion of the protests? Seems disingenuous.

Of course not, but when people are opportunist they don't think it is wrong when they do it only other people. There is always groups willing to play the victim card too. So if you call out a fallacy in their argument, but they associate themselves with a group such as BLM then they will just claim you're racist. People should evaluate individuals as a whole but a lot of people want to hear someone get called a racist or Nazi without any context and then have a mob attack them. The ironic part is that they were just projecting and then mob ends up becoming what they claim to be against.

It’s seriously “mind boggling” that those in support of this movement conveniently look past the extreme far right organizers and tolerated participants in for the ride.

The BLM fundraising will no doubt turn out to be a massive fraud. Even CA is investigating the non-profit and where money went. And there were some massive corporate donations in there.

https://news.yahoo.com/california-doj-targets-leaderless-blm...

Pretty sure it would be unfair to dismiss the entire movement over the obvious massive corruption of its leaders.

The founders of BLM are far-left extremists ("trained Marxists", abolish capitalism, dismantle the nuclear family etc., it's not like their agenda is a secret.)

Does it boggle your mind that many people who support BLM and believe that black lives matter aren't literal communists like that movement's leaders? People can support the general goals of a protest without being fully on board with the entire agenda of everyone involved.

I certainly do not concur with any ideology based on hate but we cannot lose our right to free speech in this country, regardless of what that speech is. Regardless of what some people think, we have no Arbiter of Truth in this country and all of us should pray that we never do. Group think is dangerous. If that was the prevailing belief in 1776, we wouldn't be a country. If people in the 1960s had the same belief, Dr. King's movement would have been crushed. Think, people.

What I'm going to say is controversial (of course), but it's mostly true: Pat King is a poor uneducated white person, and his misguided views are a product of his difficulties in life.

Obviously his own morality and ethics play into it, but the crux of the matter is that we understand why people have beliefs like this, and how to resolve the problem. See the efforts of Daryl Davis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis

Daryl realized that most members of the KKK are down on their luck people who've been abused by the system for most of their lives. These people tend to look for scapegoats that they can rally their anger against. They have legitimate grievances that they channel into illegitimate beliefs, because of various failures of reasoning. These are not highly educated and powerful people with agendas.

The same kind of issues can be attributed to most anyone in a chronically bad situation.

It's about as much of a "gotcha" as attacking incels for being inept, frustrated, and lonely. Well, yeah.

That's why many people "overlook" things like this. Not because they agree with the sentiments that people like Pat King express, but because they understand three things:

1) The convoy protest isn't about Pat King's racist paranoia. It happens to be about a real problem that disenfranchises people. If anything, that could help people like Pat let go of their racist beliefs by realizing it's not just them with the problems.

2) Pat King is in no position to manifest his paranoid beliefs.

3) As condescending as it may be, poor and disenfranchised people tend to have problematic beliefs and behaviors; that doesn't mean they should be exiled. Otherwise, we'd wrongfully criminalize the homeless, drug addicted, and the mentally ill - which we often do, actually.

So, painting the convoy movement as fundamentally racist because you found out that there are vulnerable people involved is disingenuous and does nothing to solve the real issues that caused it. We all know what the goal of the convoy is: to drop the covid mandates.

That said, the convoy does lose it's legitimacy by not addressing the problem of people like Pat King, even as a propaganda smear. What I've just said is probably the gist of what they're thinking about it, but they haven't articulated this in public. However, I've heard them arguing about this on their Zello channel and from what I've heard they want to remove Pat King and are strongly against any racist sentiments.

Some more context on Mr. Davis in this interesting article: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-curious-case-of-daryl-davi...

The efficacy of his approach is worth investigating beyond the just-so descriptives used in your comment and the wikipedia article. Many of the people he claims to have converted are still avowed racists and klansmen.

Your immediate response is to try to attack his credibility?

> Many of the people he claims to have converted are still avowed racists and klansmen.

Where in the article did you get that? I'm sure some have "relapsed" for one reason or another, but that's not what was said here.

Also, what are you expecting exactly? 100% efficacy where they all turn into boy scouts? Have you ever worked with the homeless, or any kind of damaged people, gangs, etc. before? The "just-so" candour I use in this is because it's a well known and practiced approach in urban outreach programs that actually works to help people.

He's aiding and abetting the neo-Nazi movement by working to get many of them to doubt their negative beliefs - and putting in a good word for a couple of them in court?

This is golden bullshit, let's see the stats!

you yourself brought him up as someone to emulate if we want to fight racial discord. it seems to me that the efficacy of his methods are relevant to someone evaluating your claims.

you say "let's see the stats"-- I agree, I'd like to see them. I'm skeptical. The stories in the article I linked (that racists he "converted" are actually using him as a shield while laughing at him in private) directly contradict your point. Maybe those stories are wrong. I'm open minded to that. But you and the wikipedia article you linked certainly haven't convinced me. When I say his story as told by you is "just-so", what I mean is that it's reductive, incurious, inch-deep.

"Candour" is an odd way to describe stenographical repetition of the same blurbs he uses to get booked as a paid speaker.

There's a real telling moment where he takes the time to straighten a klansman's white hood. People who are reading this comment are probably wondering if I'm joking right now. I encourage you to look into it

> Daryl realized that most members of the KKK are down on their luck people who've been abused by the system for most of their lives. These people tend to look for scapegoats that they can rally their anger against. They have legitimate grievances that they channel into illegitimate beliefs, because of various failures of reasoning. These are not highly educated and powerful people with agendas.

I’ll take a pass on the political stuff, but this is similar to what Michael Moore was saying prior to the 2016 elections in the US. Paraphrasing, he said we were about to see how many upset, middle aged, white people feel like they’ve been disenfranchised because a lot of them would vote for Trump with the sentiment that if no one is trying to fix the system for them they figure it might as well be broken for everyone.

That was the first time I realized Trump might get elected. I understand the sentiment, but breaking the system completely will just make things worse for those people. Wealthy people can capitalize on instability. Poor people can’t.

Exactly, Michael Moore was only wrong in that it wasn't just white people that ended up supporting Trump. This is fundamentally a class problem, not a racial thing.

There are many reasonable people involved in this, and those are the people we should be focusing on. Seriously, unless you want more Trumpism then the valid issues need to be addressed.

More formal investigation into what? That sounds tyrannical to me.

Good point about that guy, I didn't know that, or anything else, about him. Obviously he's nuts and I don't think most people agree with him WRT the dumb replacement theory thing. I really don't believe that most of these nice Canadians playing hockey in the street and honking their horns are advocating at all for anything remotely related to Nazism. I mean they are not in an extremely obvious way, they are only talking about and asking for things related to vaccines and they are protesting in a remarkably peaceful way. No guns, no fires, no looting, no deaths. Yet they are being demonized as if they are literally attempting to overthrow the government.

My comment was not meant to be pedantic, I don't think its ridiculous to use the term Nazi to refer to someone that espouses ideas like that guy. I think its a misrepresentation to classify this entire thing and all the people donating to it as Nazis. Maybe there is some overlap in the types of people who would donate to something like this, but there are also a ton of completely valid other reasons to support these people or take an interest in their cause and dismissing all of them as Nazis is just wrong in my opinion.

edit After consideration and with regret, I am not that comfortable having political views represented so openly in a very public space. Not a retraction of my position but the issue of permanence is a massive privacy concern for me over a subject this sensitive and contentious. Sorry if this breaks thread flow.

If you were to walk around Ottawa and ask random protestors whether they’re aware of the document and what it states, how many do you think would know? I’ve listened to quite a few interviews with them and have not heard one mention of this document. If the people protesting aren’t aware of it, then it isn’t significant.

I would venture to say almost none and that's exactly what bothers me about it. If they did know about it, do you think they would be comfortable realizing they're in the position of being a negotiating tool to achieve this political end?

> Obviously he's nuts and I don't think most people agree with him WRT the dumb replacement theory thing.

Pat King had 50,000 followers on social media and helped organize this convoy. Surely some of these thousands of followers agreed with his message, and surely many of those showed up, along with other white nationalist sympathizers.

I agree that most people are ignorant this aspect of the convoy, and most people on the ground would not agree with his racist views, but I want to highlight that the number of white supremacists showing up to a convoy organized by a white supremacist would not be a trivial number.

> No guns, no fires, no looting, no deaths

It has been fairly peaceful in terms of physical harm, but there has been one fire set in a residential building with fireworks, and the arsonists taped the front doors shut. There have been a few assault arrests as well. While I'm not sure anyone has been arrested for gun charges, I'd be willing to be money on long haul truckers keeping firearms nearby.

Hopefully things stay peaceful during the looming counter-protests.

> Yet they are being demonized as if they are literally attempting to overthrow the government.

The organizer of the original GoFundMe that got cancelled, Tamara Lich, was one of the original members of the Maverick party. This party is a proponent of breaking off western Canada into its own nation. Organizing a blockade at Canada's capitol while collecting millions of dollars lays good groundwork for future separatist plans.

This has bloodied the waters, and on a lighter note, the "Queen of Canada" has shown up to reaffirm that Justin's government isn't legitimate.

https://twitter.com/CarymaRules/status/1489326612139151369

While there's no way this person is going to actually overthrow the government, she kind of wants to, and so do the dozens of fringe supporters you hear cheering her on during her speech.

So I guess in summary while it isn't a Nazi rally, there be nazis, and while they aren't literally attempting to overthrow the government, there be overthrowers.

So one persons views implies everyones views? Also, so what? Is it against the law to have views. As long as his actions don't break the law, the freedom to think for yourself is paramount. Maybe he has reasons for his views that are compelling. Maybe he has life experiences that informed and shaped his views that are logical. Dismissal is lazy and stupid.

Isn't this a whataboutist argument? It's a logical fallacy

Comparing two similar situations that are treated differently isn’t a whataboutism.

> They also took a dump of all donors info and are only offering it to journalists and researchers

It's crime in the name of politics. Note how most of the 'leaks' (hacks) on their main page are against a specific perceived political leaning [1]. This will not just affect the freedom convoy, but also the company, the other campaigns they host there, the livelihoods and safety of those who donated to the freedom convoy, and countless other casualties. Having a board of advisors that they selected, but do not have to listen to, does not mean they are acting ethically [2].

> I can't believe the number of people celebrating this, its absolutely crazy to me.

CNN analyst Juliette Kayyem [3] tweeted [4]:

"The convoy protest, applauded by right wing media as a "freedom protest," is an economic and security issue now. The Ambassador Bridge link constitutes 28% of annual trade movement between US and Canada. Slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks"

The irony is, these people who are celebrating the hacks that target working class truckers, will also be the most affected in their isolated concrete fortresses, if they were to lose their jobs. The food won't deliver itself to the city. They clearly preferred the truckers when they were seen but not heard.

> So many people liberally throwing around the word "nazi" and calling this an insurrection, just completely boggles the mind.

Hopefully more people question "official media authorities", the framing bias on this story has simply been insane. The past 2/3 years has been a large social experiment in media-based manipulation. Name a single government that has not exerted pressure to affect the publication of materials related to COVID.

[1] https://ddosecrets.com/wiki/Distributed_Denial_of_Secrets

[2] https://ddosecrets.com/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliette_Kayyem

[4] https://twitter.com/juliettekayyem/status/149175716730890240...

Go to /r/ottawa. Read the megathreads on what's going on. Maybe you'll start to understand why many are celebrating this hack. Why so many Ottawans are very angry about what's going on.

There's been non-stop noise at all hours. Residents downtown who've faced constant harassment. Attempts made by the occupiers to lock residents in. Businesses forced to shut. Roadways and highways blocked for days. They're terrorizing the residents of downtown. And in the face of all of this, the police have essentially surrendered.

They're calling for Trudeau to be overthrown and arrested. They're not only occupying the center of the capital, they spent 6 days blocking the most important economic transport line in Canada. They've blockaded border points in the West too. Closing some essential crossings. If this was a poor, developing nation, you'd be labeling this as an insurrection. And you'd be correct.

And about the nazi thing, yeah, that's probably an accurate label. Many of the leadership are white supremacists. The connections to far right groups are clear. Hell, there's many of these idiots carrying Confederate flags in Canada of all places. If you're proudly waving the Confederate flag in 2022 in a place that's far far from the South, I think it's pretty clear what you support.

And on top of all that, there's clear evidence much of this was engineered by people in the United States. From the near constant Trump flags flown in the occupation, to the trail of money, to the organizational efforts spearheaded by Americans. Not to mention the organization done in FB groups led by hacked accounts.* There was some serious effort put into this. The fundraising hack will give a little sunlight into those efforts. Not enough sunlight, but it's a start.

Seriously, start reading about what the people of Ottawa have endured for the past 3 weeks. You apparently have no knowledge of this. Get back to me and tell me "who the bad guys really are here."

* - And do look into the weirdness of the FB organizing. Some Canadian journalists have dug into it. They wondered why the more popular Canadian trucker FB groups had a woman from Missouri as the only admin. And then they discovered the woman from Missouri hasn't been in control of her account for several months now.

https://www.grid.news/story/misinformation/2022/02/08/the-ha...

I've been inconvenienced by construction noise once, jackhammers nearly non-stop and such. Had to decamp to a hotel for a month.

I don't think I'd support doxxing every construction worker and ruining their future lives, and it wasn't even a political protest.

If we start villifying protests, democracy is finished, and we are back into the feudal days. Which seems to be the trend these days anyway, so perhaps it's all moot.

Every protest make people uncomfortable, part of living in democratic society.

> I'm starting to see who the bad guys really are here..

There you go. Everything they don’t like is a Nazi and yet they are behaving like them and banning, breaching other people’s websites and anything that runs and crawls to this. It’s quite predictable, repetitive and boring to the point that the word has lost its meaning.

If GoFundMe was hacked, they would say that ‘it is a threat to our democracy’. I and many others would not like that to happen and hacking any service they don’t like is quite what an extremist would do. You can tell whoever did it, is not on anyone’s side here.

They can do it to anyone, even to companies like GoDaddy [0], which I’m sure when they got breached there were celebrations that the hackers really got the bad guys and everyone was happy with the whole situation. /s

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29306554

The term Nazi has just become defacto word used to censor people cause of the emotional reaction people have been brainwashed into exhibiting when they hear it.