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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44935 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Let's kick this CW thread off with a discussion of the KiwiFarms attacks. Broad strokes include:

CloudFlare posted just yesterday on how they were turning off KiwiFarms use of their DDOS protection. This was 4 days after their post attempting to explain their "abuse policies" and how they would respond to such things, a casual reading of which would suggest that they would not do this. Their claimed justification for this was "potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site". They did not detail exactly what acts and threats were posted and the nature of the site moderator's response.

KiwiFarms is back up at https://kiwifarms.ru/ (note that this is somewhat spotty, they are still actively under attack) (https://archive.ph/2tS7Y should work if their site is not responding at the moment). The site admin has created a post here in which he lists the user and post that he suspects was the trigger for this, the reasons why he thinks the post was suspicious, and the actions the admins took in response, which included banning the user in about half an hour.

To me this looks like a flop on CloudFlare's part. KiwiFarms may or may not be honest in their explanation post, but it's a lot more detail than anyone's posted on the "ban it" side on exactly what were the posts of concern.

This is a political decision as usual. The object level means nothing. The activists are just flexing their power over the industry and anyone who expected anything else of Cloudflare when they bent previously under sufficient strain was deluding themselves.

Now, where's the startup that provides blockchain based DDoS protection given it is one of the applications where the tech has a genuine and impressive advantage? I want to invest.

I'm a big blockchain/decentralization fan for reasons like this. Of course there are still system wide attack vectors. What happens when ethereum becomes the chain of dissidents and progchain gets buy in by all the respectable power centers?

We're already seeing some lines being drawn over the Tornado Cash incident. But I have much belief in the ability of markets to build coalitions of limited interests out of disorganized people.

Besides, the whole point of cypherpunk is that you don't need permission or assent from power. It doesn't matter how much they disapprove if they can't stop you.

But they can stop us is the issue. In both a pos and pow system if freedom chain is small enough it's vulnerable to sybil attacks.

I know the theoretical weaknesses. But in these matters I defer to practicality. I don't believe there's been a successful attack against large chains, even ones like Monero where it would be a direct interest of state actors to pull off.

Ultimately they can just send men with guns to kill anyone they don't like, it's not like principles have reliably stopped people with power from doing that in the past. But if it's impractical, they often focus their attention elsewhere and leave us alone, for a time.

Freedom is always to be found in those cracks that the all powerful castle has decided aren't worth crushing yet. Arguably there's not even any other form of freedom.

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