08.23.21
Gemini version available ♊︎For Resistance to Censorship (e.g. Evidence of Corruption and War Crimes) Get Off ‘the Cloud’
Always keep track of the "master" of the platform; all the rest may turn out to be largely irrelevant technical details
When one single master (a for-profit corporation controlled by the world’s richest person) controls all of your platform
Summary: Ahead of our 15th anniversary we’ll have published several more important series; we’re preparing for the next suppression/censorship attempts
THE longtime readers would likely know this already, but it is no secret that Microsoft/Bill Gates and the EPO have long attempted to gag us. DDOS attacks aside, even as far back as 2007 or 2008 we were already receiving threats. Legal threats, death threats, even threats directed at hosts or my boss (at work, totally unrelated to this site!) because people in positions of power cannot help themselves. They always try to shut up critics and exposers. That’s just what they do!
“They always try to shut up critics and exposers. That’s just what they do!”The solution to this can be partly technical; the other aspects boil down to social engineering (like bribery attempts). We want to carry on publishing exclusive stories which would give some publishers (or platforms) ‘cold feet’. To give one example, Medium is censoring articles about Microsoft, from an insider from Microsoft who provided proof of the claims made (internal communications). How is one supposed to expose corruption if the platform forbids the inclusion of hard proof (or ‘smoking gun’)? To give another example, a journalist whom I spoke to for an article lost his job shortly afterwards; the article was an exposé about Bill Gates and he lost his job when Gates suddenly became the editor of the publisher. No kidding. We wrote about this before. Two years before the media reported about Gates cheating on his wife with girls whom he compelled to sign NDAs, Gates also paid my boss (with an NDA signed; he only told me about it later). That happened as soon as I started this series so any claims that this was a coincidence are very weak/improbable. According to media reports, this was also when Bill’s wife, Melinda, approached her lawyers for a divorce and Bill literally fainted (according to sources familiar with those matters). He was mortified about people discovering what he had done. There are limits to how much of the media and social control media he can buy/bribe and nowadays he finds it harder to silence people.
Earlier this year, as soon as we were ready to commence this series about Microsoft and the EPO breaking the law together Microsoft suddenly sent a job offer to our host (which thankfully she opened up to us about… and then declined the offer). I’ve been doing this for longer than the site (my personal blog goes back to 2004 and my site goes further back than the blog), so I became familiar with some of those tricks. We also include many articles about censorship in Daily Links and I spoke to Julian Assange about how Wikileaks was being suppressed/silenced.
“This problem is not limited to Amazon as ClownFlare can do the same.”We’re currently very busy making the site/platform a lot more robust. There’s also an in-depth investigation into corruption, which is going to yield a number of long series (assured to have big impact). We won’t mention any pertinent details as any clues (as to the nature of the series), as this would enable face-saving preparations, secrecy, revisionism and so on.
Many people probably don’t know or recall this, but Amazon ended up de-platforming Wikileaks more than a decade back for merely showing evidence of war crimes in places like Afghanistan (and how the US Government lied about it). This only happened after intense political pressure (King, Joe Lieberman and maybe others).
“Long story short, the ideal situation involves putting the eggs in many baskets, including many locations and protocols.”It is worth remembering that Amazon won't even say where the datacentres are (employees need to leak this information to Wikileaks), so they’re obviously hostile to leakers. Amazon doesn’t tolerate truths or facts; imagine that Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, bought some of the most powerful media…
This problem is not limited to Amazon as ClownFlare can do the same. There’s already ample precedence (several precedents). DNS and network/ISPs are a lot less likely to resort to this, except in unusual circumstances following court orders (after due process). Same for Let’s Encrypt, which can in theory revoke certificates (it happened before). Outsourcing “trust” (for site access) is risky when the CAs claim to be “free”, but secret rules or exceptions apply.
Long story short, the ideal situation involves putting the eggs in many baskets, including many locations and protocols. At one point we did ask Wikileaks if it wanted to host copies/mirrors of the EPO leaks.
The strategy is more intricate than it may seem on the surface as at the very least it discourages takedown attempts, being a form of deterrence (in IPFS takedowns are not even possible because copies are everywhere and the hash gets them irrespective of one or more copies being removed).
“It’s probably important to speak about our experiences because hopefully they can help others.”Over the years we’ve faced many takedown attempts. Various kinds of threats, or various different types, were made against us. When copyright law was leveraged by heavyweights like ISO or Germany it actually did work (too expensive to fight with them, even though a defence can be based on the public’s right/need to know about corruption).
It’s probably important to speak about our experiences because hopefully they can help others. There’s a reason for media cowardice and the occasional cover-up. They’re technically and legally unprepared. Our Gemini mirror is meanwhile getting noticed. This is just hours ago… █
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