LemmyWorld is a terrible place for communities to exist. Rationale:
- Lemmy World is centralized by disproportionately high user count
- Lemmy World is centralized by #Cloudflare
- Lemmy World is exclusive because Cloudflare is exclusive
Itās antithetical to the #decentralized #fediverse for one node to be positioned so centrally and revolting that it all happens on the network of a privacy-offender (CF). If #Lemmy World were to go down, a huge number of communities would go with it.
So whatās the solution?
Individual action protocol:
- Never post an original thread to #LemmyWorld. Find a free world non-Cloudflare decentralized instance to start new threads. Create a new community if needed. (there are no search tools advanced enough to have a general Cloudflare filter, but #lemmyverse.net is useful because it supports manually filtering out select nodes like LW)
- Wait for some engagement, ideally responses.
- Cross-post to the relevant Lemmy World community (if user poaching is needed).
This gets some exposure to the content while also tipping off readers of the LW community of alternative venues. LW readers are lazy pragmatists so they will naturally reply in the LW thread rather than the original thread. Hence step 2. If an LW user wants to interact with another responder they must do so on the more free venue. Step 3 can be omitted in situations where the free-world community is populated well enough. If /everything/ gets cross-posted to LW then there is no incentive for people to leave LW.
Better ideas? Would this work as a collective movement?
Itās clear from your disingenuous summary that you donāt grasp human rights well since you have summarized the original points in a way that actually omits the critical components of a human rights infringement. Someone who is familiar the UNās Universal Declaration of Human Rights would not know from your summary how CF is violating human rights (answer: students being excluded from educational resources). The mere existence of CF in itself is meaningless in your abstraction. You act like a Cloudflare PR rep.
Another disingenuous summary. This also demonstrates your misunderstanding of software freedom. Javascript does not inherently undermine software freedom. Javascript that supports the 4 freedoms exists.
Another disingenuous summary, as it omits how you get from A to B. Vector images would be fine, but itās not vector images that are pushed. Text browsers are treated as robots. Iām not going to repeat the whole article here.
The article is already written as a concise minimal outline. The only reason to summarize it further as you did is to bring a strawman style of malice by omission.
Can you cite a specific āexaggeratedā claim that is not supported with a cited source?
Not my problem. Smarter admins have figured out how to secure Lemmy instances without surreptitiously compromising everyone elseās security. infosec.pub demonstrates this. Users have no need for these Cloudflared instances when there are so many non-CFd instances that operate inclusively.
That ās covered in the article. Search ābootersā.
Oh come on, did you write that article? I donāt buy the human rights thing at all, itās incredibly far fetched, almost maniacal. In any case, the school decided to implement CF as a tool, why does it make CF to blame?
The document makes valid claims against CF (Iām against the whole MitM approach), but plucking out things like āsoftware freedomā for a commercial product? It is idealistic to a fault.
Ctrl+F ātorā, highlight matches, wow thats a lot ā could be summarised to a single paragraph of maybe 2 sentences. It repeats so often I started to roll my eyes.
A false statement in my opinion, its written in such an exaggerated fashion that there are repeated statements throughout, and is an all out attack on CF that begins to reach for some really minor infractions on idealistic viewpoints; case in point: vector vs bitmap images. It detracts from the real issues.
Dismissive because? Yes there are other tools, using similar technologies. Back in the day, a single disgruntled user would need to pool resources to perform a super simple DDoS using bandwidth as a tool alone (ie. smurf). Now the number of users with 1Gbit upload at home is rising (or just rent a few VPS), and the number of pooled resources required is much lower. That doesnāt factor in slightly more sophistic DoS using expensive queries. Lemmy is susceptible to this, but the entire federated instances design is a natural defense. But your lone website? An open target that tools like CF come in handy for. The fact that it is implemented as a MitM is unfortunate, and I wish it were better as it makes CF the holder of all the keys.
My take on the article is:
MitM is bad, CF are capable of grabbing all our sensitive data. There is no evidence yet that this has been exploited. Tor has been blocked by default. The rest of the document is hyperbole.
Again, it would do you some good to read the UNās Universal Declaration of Human Rights (#UDHR).
Article 21 Ā¶2: āEveryone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.ā
Article 26: āEveryone has the right to education. ā¦ higher education shall be equally accessible to allā
Do you understand what that means? Does it say āEveryone in Denmark except those who are excluded by the private US corporation Cloudflare or donāt agree with the terms of US corporation Proquestā?
What about public schools that force students to agree to Googleās terms of service and patronize Google Inc as a condition of class participation? Do you see a human rights problem there (assuming youāve read and understand the above two UDHR paragraphs)?
Thereās enough blame to go around to the school and all entities involved. Cloudflare gets blame for their defaults. Do a search on the #powerOfDefaults if you donāt grasp the importance of defaults.
This so-called ācommercialā product is being used in the public sector, which means people who need public service are being forced to execute non-free software.
This logic doesnāt follow. First of all, repetition and exaggeration are completely different attributes. You seem to be claiming both yet cannot pin down either. Which claim is redundant? Which claim is exaggerated? Itās better if you copy exact statements here if you want to make any sense. So far youāre just generalizing and hand-waving. When I search for āTorā in that article, I see no false statements. Be specific.
Thereās no such distinction in the article between those types of images. The distinction was only made in this thread to illustrate the failure of your strawman by critical omission.
Not at all. infosec.pub is not using Cloudflare or anything like it. infosec.pub demonstrates how to avoid anything like CF.
This is like saying I donāt need to lock my car/house door because the lack of security has not been exploited. Of course itās foolish to extend needless trust. In security we act on potential not just react to what has occurred. We lock our door even if weāve not witnessed an intrusion.
Yes. It means you canāt access the resource using the technology you prefer (seriously, who use wget to browse the web?), but it doesnāt stop you from reaching the resource as a person. Hence human rights being the thing, not wget/tor rights.
I donāt, for the same reason as I have to register at the library before taking a book.
No, Iām not uninformed. I just donāt agree with you.
Ah, okay, I understand your view point here. I donāt care much for that.
You brought it up, it was your example. The document says the fact CF use images, that they are a blight on the environment. Its like an onion article title. š
Good for them.
(emphasis mine) This is not about preferencesĀ¹. If your ISP uses CGNAT because youāre too poor to afford a subscription that gives you a unique unshared IP address, you are blocked from Cloudflare sites regardless of which browser you use. Itās also not down to preference if you canāt afford to maintain a platform that supports the latest GUI browser. Libraries are also blocked and users of libraries have no control over the libraries IP or installed browser. The elitism you endorse is of course at the expense of excluding human beings.
1: what you perceive as a āpreferenceā is perversely broad. I donāt use Chromium not because I have a persnickety problem with the UI or UX, but because it includes Google spyware. I object to privacy abuse. A vast majority of the population uses Chromium and so a vast majority of websites cater for Chromium & ultimately marginalizing non-Chromium users who object to the #privacy intrusion. Itās worth noting that privacy abuse is also a human rights issue in itself:
UDHR article 12: āNo one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence,ā¦ā
So when a public service imposes a means of access that arbitrarily abuses someoneās privacy, that is also a violation of human rights.
This logic doesnāt follow. To recap with emphasis the paragraph that applies to public libraries:
Article 21 Ā¶2: āEveryone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.ā
Library registration in Europe is inclusive does not exclude people who do not agree with the terms of service of a US corporation like Google. It ensures eligibility by verifying residency. If library reg were to exclude locals who Google excludes by requiring a Google login/interaction, it would indeed by a human rights violation for the same reason.
Thatās what I said. Itās my example, not the authorās. And it was an example that exposed your strawman attempt. The example did the job it was meant for.
CAPTCHA images are raster images. Did you follow the citation? The logic follows. Graphics are far heavier than text.
BTW, I personally disable images in my GUI browser. It makes me look more like a bot & get treated as such but I consume far less bandwidth - thus less energy.
I have several customers on CGNAT and they are not blocked from Cloudflare. Which puts the rest of your point on the back foot.
Of course it does. You missed the distinction between excluding a person and a means. If the user couldnāt access a site from their current location, they could use another one that isnāt blocked. Therefore the person isnāt blocked, no human rights violation. Which is totally absurd, I canāt beleive we are talking about human rights violation in this context.
Right, and in the document they just say images are a blight on the environment, which is laughable. Your attempt to clarify it, just made it look even weaker. No strawman rhetoric here, just calling it out to be a muted point.
And on that point I think you are in the extreme. An extremist that ācanāt be bargained with, it canāt be reasoned with, it doesnāt feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stopā¦ EVERā
Putting a stop to this now, the effort far outstrips the fun factor.
The nuance is lost on your part. When you exclude a personās only means of access, you exclude the person. When you make public service conditional on agreeing to the terms of a private corporation, you also exclude the people who disagree with the terms. Cloudflare is also non-transparent and never tells those they marginalize why they are being marginalized. The marginalized donāt even necessarily know there is an unblocked means of access or what that means of access entails.
You donāt know what āblockā means. A block is an obstruction. Itās not necessarily absolute. If the road is blocked by a fence, of course you can circumvent the block by climbing the fence. This does not mean the roadblock ceases to exist. Anyone who is either unfit to climb the fence or unwilling remains blocked. The discriminatory denial of access to a public service is a human rights violation. If a black person is denied access to a library, we donāt say: āwell they can paint their skin white and then they can get access, thus there is no human rights violation hereā.
Itās a strawman because you misrepresented the original claim by leaving out critical details. Had you quoted the claim it would not have been a strawman. Or if you had been wise enough to know which details are too critical in the thesis for omission, you would not have created a strawman. But itās clear that your goal was simply to smear the article so the strawman was obviously intentional.
When I load images it will sucks dry my limited monthly bandwidth credit. An unlimited connection would cost me more than triple the fees. And yet you call it āextremistā to be frugal & pro-environment/socially responsible rather than wastefully indulgent. This tendency to look to smear people who are either socially responsible or not corporate pushovers is apparently why you have this pro-repressive tech giant attitude that doesnāt mind marginalizing people.