On 15/04/25 03:38, Constantine A. Murenin wrote:
Also, the same principle that prevents Spain from selectively blocking
a single Cloudflare site, also prevents me, as a network
administrator, in the privacy of my own home, from blocking ads and
other undesirable resources throughout the entirety of my home
network, on all devices, in bulk.
You control the endpoints of the communication, so you may install
uBlock Origin in your browser.
Unless your browser happens to run on an iPhone, in which case - you had
free choice to buy a phone that supported ad-blocking or one where you
were prevented from ad-blocking, so you have nobody to blame for that
choice but yourself.
Unless you live in one of those weird social circles where the text
bubbles have to be blue or you get ostracized.
And after the ability to do this network-wide blocking has been
removed, Cloudflare's partners are also slowly but surely removing the
ability to block said content within your own endpoint devices, too,
by removing all the ad-blockers from all the stores, and preventing
relevant API access from within the browser, too; plus making it a ToS
violation to alter website contents through a plug-in. Sorry, but
Cloudflare is not a good guy in this story.
Absolutely. Don't buy those products. Encourage everyone you know to not
buy those products. They'll get the message eventually.
The web may well split in two: a free one, and an enslaved one. It will
be a real shame if the enslaved-net overlaps 100% with the
hard-to-censor-net. It will probably overlap 100% with the
do-not-want-to-censor-net, because most large content companies bend the
knee immediately at the slightest threat of blocking. To some extent,
this sort of thing already happened with Tor.
A network serves one master, but an inter-network, being comprised of
many networks, serves many masters. All that can be done in protocol
design is to make it all-or-nothing, on purpose, which is why things
have been going this way in the past 30 years of protocol design. By
aligning incentives a certain way, the least bad tradeoff for each
master is to maximize access to information. When you're a dictator who
can suppress dissent for no cost, you do so. When you're a dictator who
can only suppress dissent by destroying everything that you rule over,
you resign because all outcomes are bad for you. Think of it like the
second amendment of the internet, or mutually assured destruction.
I don't like Cloudflare but they are in the right in this particular
situation. We'll see whether Spain can politically tolerate shutting
down half the internet during football matches. Remember, Italy made the
same decision several months ago, but quickly reversed it and went so
far as to pretend it never happened. If it wasn't like this with
Cloudflare, they'd probably block a handful of small hosting provider
ASNs permanently. Is that good?
(this is a quote - formatting accidentally removed because Thunderbird is
terrible)
Not quite, because the entire Wikipedia in all languages is then
simply blocked, so, they're not even able to read any of the other
articles from Wikipedia either, in any language. This violates primal
protocol design principles of flexibility and resilience, business
continuity and backwards compatibility.
(my answer)
Flexibility for who? Resilience for who?
A protocol which gives dictators the flexibility to resiliently block
dissent isn't necessarily a good thing, unless you're the dictator. (Are
you?)
A protocol which gives political dissidents the flexibility to
resiliently communicate with each other seems better, doesn't it? You
can't have both. It's flexible and resilient for one or the other. (Or
neither, in which case it sucks)
Are you trying to make one single internet, which implies that local
administrators cannot selectively block things, or are you trying to
make a fragmented internet where you're only connected to part of it and
which part depends on how you connect?
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