frabbit

Agreed. My attempt at a quibble was foolish.

Signal Corp is doing just fine. Those donations would have a much bigger effect for the people developing Matrix and associated applications.

Another reason why those arguing against centralized messaging systems as opposed to de-centralized, federated were correct. Who wants Signal and their US-centric board to decide they can do anything.

If Signal were really sticking it to the UK-vassal state they would be able to continue to provide end-to-end encryption and force their EU aircraft carrier to go through the public, international embarrasment of running their own version of the Great Firewall.

No. Signal is not the solution. The position that they are taking publicly in this dispute with the UK vassal state is correct on the face of it. But they now have some people on their board that raise red flags for anyone interested in privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36346396

In some ways the faithful seeking the grail of "encryption" which will protect them from the Evil mirrors the belief of earlier generations that a Constitution is enough on its own.

Nothing is meaningful without the physical and social power to enforce it. When you have that then even the absurd becomes reality and common sense.

With the recent board changes in Signal (Katherine Maher and other people highly associated with the government of the USA) it is reasonable to assume that it compromised in some way. The UK probably recognizes this and wants to make it a little bit harder for US diplomats to evade interception. Meanwhile France and Germany will use Element Matrix.

Corporations are legally recognized to have personhood in the USA. They are also legal entities.

Anyway is a "person" not also a legal entity in some way?

In short, I understand what you are saying but I don't think it is precise enough.

There is no provable claim by GCHQ for any of this. They are professionally liars and deceivers. The first public, peer-reviewed publishers are the ones that get the credit. GCHQ claims are just unproven British government propaganda from people that have agreed on record that they will lie, deceive and hide the truth.

Don't impute motives to strangers on the internet. I have no frustration.

I am requesting a statement from someone that has been very outspoken on many issues around secure, safe, private communication in the past and is in a better position than any of us to follow up on his advocacy.

He has had a very strong effect on the ecosystem including explicitly denigrating non-centralized efforts like the Matrix ecosystem (to the detriment of these non-US controlled systems supported by the French and Germans who had reason to be cautious in the wake of the Snowden revelations).

As someone who has had a significant impact in this area he owes us. Otherwise we can all draw our own conclusions.

Let`s be truly fair: the USA "federal government" is historically and presently one of the biggest committers of war crimes in the world. If you work for it you work for evil. I am sure it keeps the kids in Montessori and enables travel to the last wildernesses on earth, but that doesn`t count for much for the millions of Vietnamese, Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan, East Timorese etc etc

This announcement shows clearly that Signal is at the end of its life and it is time to jump ship.

Moxie the anarchist owes the rest of us a public statement about what he thinks Signal is now that the board has US State Department ghouls on it.

Katherine Maher? The US State Department definitely-not-a-spook one? The one that was at Wikipedia and "spent time in Syria and Lybia"?

Sounds wonderful for a messaging system that is going to be definitely trusted not to be manipulated by the USA.

It strikes me that the effort that goes into trying to outright suppress disinformation is also a waste of time. It leaks through anyway and the consequences of being seen to suppress it leads to distrust.

All that you can hope is that the person reading it is open to information and changing their mind. If they are not then there is nothing that can be done anyway.

I have been drawn into trying to evaluate this claim that the Czech Republic / Czechia has had a statement issued by its "Supreme Prosecutor" that anyone supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine will face criminal penalties. I would love to be able to go to a reputable media source to evaluate it. It is inordinately difficult to judge. I would prefer that the BBC/CNN/LA Times spent time debunking this sort of thing or confirming it. As it is I am on my own with nothing but a wall of flag-waving and emotional condemnation instead of investigative journalism -- that's what I want from the media -- not opinion pieces: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30560672

In looking at that story it was fascinating to see the struggle within the Czech Republic with various sides accused of being Russian mouthpieces and the establishment of state censorship apparatuses well in advance of this phase of the conflict with Russia.

Also, it could usefully be used to identify people for treatment as was done in the old USSR: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2800147/

A formal ban on editors being members/volunteers/associated-with state-related propaganda outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) would be good. It wouldn't stop anything underhanded, but at least they would not be able to lie to themselves that they were doing nothing wrong.

> What would be an example of an "appropriate" use of this technology?

Well, investigative officers concerned for the well-being of the individual and the potential for self harm or danger to others could attempt to help them with a taser or a shotgun.

Or, if you are a liberal you could have an algorithmic silo-ing of their posts? That way it would be demonstrably not a prejudiced censorship but something that could be investigated later if the right channels are followed.

It could be coupled with the software that detects whether people are homosexual or conservative based on their physiognomy.

Well Ireland was made to vote twice on ratifying the Lisbon Treaty. The people's vote got it wrong the first time with a "no", but after suitable re-education they got it right the next go around. Luckily there was no need for a third vote. There's a nice wikipedia article on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_European_Constitution_re...

I don't care if the US "invaded anyone for territorial expansion" or did it for shits'n'giggles. It has done all the above and more which weakens any chance that calls for democracy, international order, peace, stability and trade can work.

The US is deeply disruptive to any of that happening because it opens the door to the MiniMe despots being able to claim that spending stupid amounts of GDP on weapons and having a "strong leader" is the only thing which will see them safe from being invaded "not for territorial expansion" during a "long fucking time".

That's why it is appropriate, relevant and not simply whataboutism.

Russia and other states are worse than the USA because they need to be in order to claw their way up the dungheap piled up by US foreign policy. And there is little inherent in US norms or culture which would prevent similar anti-democratic and anti-liberal punishments. To back to the OP: these are all shades of authoritarianism and we see calls all over the media and this very forum in favor of censorship, war and other stupidities.

Don't kid yourself, this isn't whataboutism, it's the very subject under discussion: Russia is violating international agreements and norms and in part this is because the USA has shat all over those for a very long time.

Actually, having googled and looked around I am highly conflicted on this. There is no coverage either pro/con in The Times, The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/freedom-of-speech-and-...), LA Times, Washington Post, The Economist, The Guardian.

There are mentions only on disreputable English language media like Breitbart, forums like Reddit that all go back to citing BalkanInsight¹,² who in turn cite a publication called TN Nova³.

1. https://birn.eu.com/news-and-events/meet-the-people-behind-b...

2. https://balkaninsight.com/2022/03/01/czechia-mulls-penalisin...

3. https://tn.nova.cz/zpravodajstvi/clanek/455893-za-podporu-ru...

This root/source one is hard to evaluate. Not speaking the language or having much of a clue about it it is hard to tell whether their other stories about e.g. 30,000 Ukranian refugees arriving and being given apartments and insurance are meant to be laudatory or stir up resentment.

But there is a website⁴ which seems to belong to the Czech Republic justice ministry if I am reading their ssl cert correctly. Using translation software suggests that this is accurate reporting of statements by their chief prosecutor:

4. https://web.archive.org/web/20220226184549/http://verejnazal...

In addition I found what seemed to be a non-fake news media platform (Radio Prague (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Prague) which reported the same interpretation in English⁵ here

5. https://english.radio.cz/chief-prosecutor-warns-against-publ...

and this Czech language one⁶ which is more detailed:

6. https://web.archive.org/web/20220226151448/https://www.irozh...

While trying to discern if this is actually Russians trying to make the EU look like a bunch of authoritarians restricting information I found this fascinating quote on wikipedia:

"Fake news outlets in the Czech Republic redistribute news in Czech and English originally produced by Russian sources. Czech president Miloš Zeman has been supporting media outlets accused of spreading fake news.[252]

The Centre Against Terrorism and Hybrid Threats (CTHH) is unit of the Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic primarily aimed at countering disinformation, fake news, hoaxes and foreign propaganda. The CTHH started operations on January 1, 2017. The CTHH has been criticized by Czech President Miloš Zeman, who said: "We don't need censorship. We don't need thought police. We don't need a new agency for press and information as long as we want to live in a free and democratic society."[253]

In 2017 media activists started a website Konspiratori.cz maintaining a list of conspiracy and fake news outlets in Czech.[254] " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news#Europe

So where am I left? Uncertain. It looks like a real government website with a statement that to my probably naive eyes has been reported accurately in a few places. But I find it hard to believe that none of the big-hitter, reputable news outlets has completely refused to cover this.

If this does turn out to be true and completely unreported then it's a terrible reflection of reputable media coverage. A lot of the states recently admitted to the EU have a fragile relationship with norms around democracy, free speech, invidual sexual and reproducive rights. This, if true, would definitely indicate that the ex-Communist czech government officials are on a very different tangent to the core states of the EU.

If the story turns out not to be true then it's also a terrible reflection of media coverage in that this story is obviously out there doing the rounds and needs to be addressed and debunked.

Would love to hear from Czech speakers/readers about how I got this wrong.

I disagree. The advice to disable SELinux, like your assertion that it's too complicated for ordinary users, belongs to an older time. It's time to lay that myth to bed.

Sure, if you're messing around with k8s and doing fun eBPF stuff you are going to need to be careful. But for just installing an OS, running it to do some web-browsing, gaming, image editing, wordprocessing? I would be highly surprised if the defaults do not work.

> it's clear that for most lay folks, SELinux is software that doesn't work.

I have always used selinux enabled systems. For the first few years it was a bit confusing and frustrating at times, but for the last (decade?) I have never had to butt heads with it. The default policies shipped by e.g. Fedora (a userland closest to the development of this work and therefore probably better maintained than some others) work out of the box without hassle.

This very article refutes your assertion: here we see SELinux working for ordinary users without any additional fiddling. You, on the other hand, are probably exposed to this privilege escalation.

At this stage I am going to assume that it is a lie. I cannot find any reputable mainstream media references to it.

We just had RT and Sputnik taken off the air by regulators in the EU.

And why would it be alright if a business did it?

Are there any Czech speakers that can help out? I have been trying to verify that "Prague Morning" story and cannot find references to it in their list of main newspapers in wikipedia.

Important note on this:

"Fortunately, the default security hardenings in most container environments are enough to prevent container escape. Containers running with AppArmor or SELinux are protected. "

So, all that hard work on SELinux continues to pay off.

Two things on that:

1) that was somewhat my point: so-called liberal democracies are increasingly censoring and distributing information. Exactly the Orwellian-dystopia many of us fear.

2) If we are talking about the Czech and Slovak examples posted the other day¹ I doubt the Czech authorities, if correctly reported (they seem like extra-ordinary over-reach to me, so much so that I wondered if they were Russian psyops to make the EU look undemocratic and authoritarian), have a legal leg to stand on. The laws seem to refer to war-time. It's part of an attempt to threaten people to shut up or else. I was tempted to see this as a flare-up of anti-democratic thinking from a state long run by a Stalinist political class and only recently (2004) acceded to the EU. Like Poland and Hungary there remain serious questions about the commitment to democratic principles of such states. But then I checked myself and noted that this was unfair as the EU has issued no formal condemnation of this censorship and the public appetite for being spoon fed by their betters seems high.

To be clear: Russia is committing a war crime in invading Ukraine and must withdraw. We must support the Ukranian people without allowing the authoritarians in our own societies to destroy the very values we claim to uphold. No censorship.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30545186

And this is why the GNU project, Fedora and others explicitly ask contributors for CLAs if I understand it correctly:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1857...

This coupled with the jail sentences for "disinformation" are predictable in autocracies like Russia. They desire to shutdown information and steer their subject populations into the path of correct thinking.

Very disturbing to see the EU following down this path with the censorship of RussiaToday and other Russian propaganda outfits.

As a citizen of a democracy it is essential that I have the right to access and evaluate all opinions. Even those which I find abhorrent.

> Those channels were toxic propaganda, psyops designed to divide and weaken Russia's enemies.

How do you know that if you can't see them? And if you have been looking at them and have made a judgement why can't other people do the same?

> Such things are never tolerated in war.

Wait, what?! The Czech Republic is at war with Russia?

> this is a period in human history where we're going to have to let go of some naive notions pertaining to "freedom of speech".

And replace it with a sophisticated, jesuitical understanding? I'd prefer if you were honest and just said you do not believe in Free Speech.

No. Your fist is a biological weapon.