Archives

Ever wonder why Plato chose to speak and write in the dialogue form? If so, you’re not alone. I’ve wondered that myself in the past while reading some of his work. And even back then it seemed to me that he was trying to somehow record some important knowledge, sometimes philosophical concepts and sometimes even (alternative) history, without getting into trouble. Read more ⟶

Zhang Zhan, a 37-year old journalist in China, has been sentenced to 4 years in jail for reporting about the COVID-19 outbreak in China. Read more ⟶

Apple appears to have become the monster that they initially set out to fight. Read more ⟶

The Internet Archive posted on their blog about implementing “fact checks” and “context” notifications on the Wayback Machine, similar to how various social media platforms such as Facebook have implemented for a while now. You may recall that I blogged a few months ago about censorship on the Internet Archive by requiring users to login to view certain content. Read more ⟶

Back in June 2019 I had warned about relying on cloud platforms for your business and for storing your (personal) data, with some examples of what could go wrong. With all the recent online censorship related to the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ more examples are piling up showing what can happen when you rely on the current centralized Software As A Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms. Read more ⟶

A few weeks ago I had noticed for the first time that the Internet Archive started requiring people to login before they are able to view certain content. To be clear, the login is not required for all content but only for specific content. Also, the login requirement is placed on the content after a while — probably when they receive complaints about it. Read more ⟶

It’s very sad to have to watch the world be swept towards mass hysteria on the basis of misleading figures concerning the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. How many people realize that the figures for the number of infections and deaths worldwide give a distorted view of the real situation? Read more ⟶

The criminal government of China, through one of their working arms called Huawei, are proposing to replace the underlying protocol of the Internet with a new protocol they call “New IP”. And if you’re a regular reader of my blog you know that this is serious cause for concern as neither the criminal Chinese government nor Huawei can be trusted. Read more ⟶

Yesterday I posted about the fact that censorship on the Internet is getting worse and that the criminal governments around the world are increasingly more often trying to censor parts or all of the Internet to stifle dissent. Read more ⟶

Private Internet Access blogged about a recent report by Access Now (February 24th 2020) titled “2019 #KeepItOn – Targeted, Cut Off, and Left in the Dark” (PDF) where they look at Internet shutdowns by criminal governments globally for the year 2019. I highly recommend reading the whole report to get an idea of how bad the situation is in various countries and the world in general. Read more ⟶

A software developer from Russia found out recently that his account on GitHub had been shadow banned. He was the only one still able to see his account and access his repositories; all other users got a 404 message in their web browsers. In an article titled “How GitHub blocked me (and all my libraries)” (March 11th 2020), ironically published on Medium, he details his experience with GitHub. Read more ⟶

An article on The Atlantic titled “How the Coronavirus Revealed Authoritarianism’s Fatal Flaw” (February 22nd 2020) discusses specific examples of what they term “authoritarian blindness”. A virus that could have been contained instead resulted in a global crisis because important information was being censored by an authoritarian system. Read more ⟶

Censorship, shadow banning, deboosting and deplatforming are hot topics these days on the Internet, especially when it concerns the major social media platforms. I’ve blogged about this often in the last few months, and this time I want to detail one of my recent experiences on Reddit so that others can learn from it. Read more ⟶

Well here you have it, pointing out serious forms of mental illness appears to be “hate speech” on Facebook. A link to my recent blog post “LGBT pride month: There is no pride in mental illness” is being censored by Facebook, probably after being reported by people who suffer from the described forms of mental illness. Read more ⟶

A few days ago Project Veritas released some videos and internal documents from Google showing exactly how Google is manipulating the public in what can only be described as a mass social engineering effort. You can hear employees from Google, who were apparently recorded without their knowledge, describe what they are doing and why. Read more ⟶

Here’s another example showing why you can’t trust and rely on the major content publishing and social media websites these days. Two days ago I received an email from Medium that they suspended my account (which I’ve had at least since February 2016). I didn’t receive any warnings beforehand nor a chance to possibly correct any mistakes. Read more ⟶

Project Veritas published an interview with a former Facebook employee revealing, among other things, the fact that Facebook has been censoring information on its platform with functionality called “deboosting”. This functionality enables Facebook to actively limit the reach certain information has by blocking (groups of) people from seeing it — the opposite effect of boosting content on Facebook. Read more ⟶