In China's case, it is a very well known and documented fact that heavy censorship is present. Of course if one thinks additional knowledge on that is useful enough to solicit wide user participation, that is certainly one way of thinking.
Related: you can "traceroute" a specific port, TCP or UDP. Different routes for different ports is a sure sign of tampering. Check the man page for syntax.
Yes, but some of them aren't. There are instances of people being banned because they participated in another sub. Instances of people being banned for criticizing Israel. It wouldn't be so much of an issue if it was like back in the day where there were a thousand independent boards. But Reddit killed that.
There's a pretty bad bias problem here because the probe app scans domains that are frequently blocked in dictatorships, but doesn't scan domains that are frequently blocked in "democracies", like Anna's Archive. Then it ends up looking like the dictatorship countries have all the censorship.
Blocking is a red herring in regimes where the other factors dominate. Anna's Archive has a political position and is one of the very few voices that survived the immense pressure. How many didn't? How many attempts were not performed at all because of it? This suppression is really hard to measure, OONI can't do anything here, it measures blocking. It's very simple to understand.
scare quoting """""""""democracies""""""""" is perfectly acceptable when it couldn't be more obvious that those so-called democracies do anything but represent the will of their peoples. do you know anyone who'd voted for having to scan their face to access verboten webseites? to have encryption backdoors in their messengers? to have state-mandated spyware preinstalled on their phones?
I would only use the term "censorship" to refer to the prevention of speech based on its content. Content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions aren't censorship according to the way I use the word, and neither is copyright protection.
Note that censorship isn't necessarily bad and restrictions on speech that aren't censorship aren't necessarily acceptable. The prohibition on child pornography is censorship but I support it, while I am opposed to IP law in its entirety.
See "Spotify lawsuit" in the wikipedia article. Also:
"In January 2024, Italy's ... ordered major internet service providers (ISPs) in the country to block Anna's Archive due to a copyright complaint..."
"In March 2024, ... ordered major ISPs in the Netherlands to block Anna's Archive and LibGen due to a request by advocacy group BREIN (which represents the interests of the Dutch entertainment industry)."
"In December 2024, the UK Publishers Association won an order from the High Court of Justice requiring major ISPs to block Anna's Archive... under section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act."
My point is - copyright is also a "content related" reason: some site is banned because the content of the site is infringing the copyright of someone else.
In the end, all censorship is content related. One could definitely argue along the spectrum of "all" to "none" censorship is appropriate, but I would guess most people actually hold the belief that "some" censorship is okay, while disagreeing on "which" censorship is okay.
If this is the case, then the bias problem is indeed relevant.
Plus, this sentence in the original post I replied to really struck me as absurd: "Content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions aren't censorship".
Let's imagine a country bans the distribution of all writings by authors in another country/region disregard of the content. It would not be censorship according to the original post.
The fact that a ban encompasses a wide variety of content could mean simply that it is difficult/undesirable to limit the scope of the ban, but the censorship always originates from the content.
You are misunderstanding time/place/manner restrictions. The rule must apply equally to all speakers regardless of topic, opinion, or political stance. If you banned "the distribution of all writings by authors in another country/region" you aren't applying the restriction equally.
Is it a bad sign if CSAM, Personal (medical, financial, etc) Records, Snuff, and Malware/Ransomeware are censored? What about manufacture of WMDs, terrorism, hate speech? Free software, and copyrighted music? Historical records of genocide?
As an aside… the if there was a real system out there that was trustworthy, it would have all of this and it would be the evidence you actually need to trust it.
If someone had a secure system for some of the worst stuff out there and it lasted more than a minute, pay attention because they might have actually solved some real problems.
German speakers probably don't understand how English can affect sentence emphasis with strict SVO word order. In German the topic of the sentence comes first and the declension tells you if its S or O.
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